The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. III. edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge

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PREFACE TO THE THIRD VOLUME.
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The present volume contains the six metrical tales which were composed within the years 1812 and 1815, the Hebrew Melodies, and the minor poems of 1809-1816. With the exception of the first fifteen poems (1809-1811)—Chansons de Voyage, as they might be called—the volume as a whole was produced on English soil. Beginning with the Giaour; which followed in the wake of Childe Harold and shared its triumph, and ending with the ill-omened Domestic Pieces, or Poems of the Separation, the poems which Byron wrote in his own country synchronize with his popularity as a poet by the acclaim and suffrages of his own countrymen. His greatest work, by which his lasting fame has been established, and by which his relative merits as a great poet will be judged in the future, was yet to come; but the work which made his name, which is stamped with his sign-manual, and [vi]which has come to be regarded as distinctively and characteristically Byronic, preceded maturity and achievement.

No poet of his own or other times, not Walter Scott, not Tennyson, not Mr. Kipling, was ever in his own lifetime so widely, so amazingly popular. Thousands of copies of the "Tales"—of the Bride of Abydos, of the Corsair, of Lara—were sold in a day, and edition followed edition month in and month out. Everywhere men talked about the "noble author"—in the capitals of Europe, in literary circles in the United States, in the East Indies. He was "the glass of fashion ... the observ'd of all observers," the swayer of sentiment, the master and creator of popular emotion. No other English poet before or since has divided men's attention with generals and sea-captains and statesmen, has attracted and fascinated and overcome the world so entirely and potently as Lord Byron.

It was Childe Harold, the unfinished, immature Childe Harold, and the Turkish and other "Tales," which raised this sudden and deafening storm of applause when the century was young, and now, at its close (I refer, of course, to the Tales, not to Byron's poetry as a whole, which, in spite of the critics, has held and still holds its own), are ignored if not forgotten, passed over if not despised—which but few know thoroughly, and "very few" are found to admire or to love. Ubi lapsus, quid feci? might the questioning spirit of the author exclaim with regard to his "Harrys and Larrys, Pilgrims and[vii] Pirates," who once held the field, and now seem to have gone under in the struggle for poetical existence!

To what, then, may we attribute the passing away of interest and enthusiasm? To the caprice of fashion, to an insistence on a more faultless technique, to a nicer taste in ethical sentiment, to a preference for a subtler treatment of loftier themes? More certainly, and more particularly, I think, to the blurring of outline and the blotting out of detail due to lapse of time and the shifting of the intellectual standpoint.

However much the charm of novelty and the contagion of enthusiasm may have contributed to the success of the Turkish and other Tales, it is in the last degree improbable that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were enamoured, not of a reality, but of an illusion born of ignorance or of vulgar bewilderment. They were carried away because they breathed the same atmosphere as the singer; and being undistracted by ethical, or grammatical, or metrical offences, they not only read these poems with avidity, but understood enough of what they read to be touched by their vitality, to realize their verisimilitude.

Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. Nay, more, the knowledge, the comprehension of essential greatness in art, in nature, or in man is not to know that there is aught to forgive. But that sufficing knowledge which the reader of average intelligence brings with him for the comprehension and appreciation of contemporary[viii] literature has to be bought at the price of close attention and patient study when the subject-matter of a poem and the modes and movements of the poet's consciousness are alike unfamiliar.

Criticism, however subtle, however suggestive, however luminous, will not bridge over the gap between the past and the present, will not supply the sufficing knowledge. It is delightful and interesting and, in a measure, instructive to know what great poets of his own time and of ours have thought of Byron, how he "strikes" them; but unless we are ourselves saturated with his thought and style, unless we learn to breathe his atmosphere by reading the books which he read, picturing to ourselves the scenes which he saw,—unless we aspire to his ideals and suffer his limitations, we are in no way entitled to judge his poems, whether they be good or bad.

Byron's metrical "Tales" come before us in the guise of light reading, and may be "easily criticized" as melo-dramatic—the heroines conventional puppets, the heroes reduplicated reflections of the author's personality, the Oriental "properties" loosely arranged, and somewhat stage-worn. A thorough and sympathetic study of these once extravagantly lauded and now belittled poems will not, perhaps, reverse the deliberate judgment of later generations, but it will display them for what they are, bold and rapid and yet exact presentations of the "gorgeous East," vivid and fresh from the hand of the great artist who conceived them out of the abundance[ix] of memory and observation, and wrought them into shape with the "pen of a ready writer." They will be once more recognized as works of genius, an integral portion of our literary inheritance, which has its proper value, and will repay a more assiduous and a finer husbandry.

I have once more to acknowledge the generous assistance of the officials of the British Museum, and, more especially, of Mr. A. G. Ellis, of the Oriental Printed Books and MSS. Department, who has afforded me invaluable instruction in the compilation of the notes to the Giaour and Bride of Abydos.

I have also to thank Mr. R. L. Binyon, of the Department of Prints and Drawings, for advice and assistance in the selection of illustrations.

I desire to express my cordial thanks to the Registrar of the Copyright Office, Stationers' Hall; to Professor Jannaris, of the University of St. Andrews; to Miss E. Dawes, M.A., D.L., of Heathfield Lodge, Weybridge; to my cousin, Miss Edith Coleridge, of Goodrest, Torquay; and to my friend, Mr. Frank E. Taylor, of Chertsey, for information kindly supplied during the progress of the work.

For many of the "parallel passages" from the works of other poets, which are to be found in the notes, I am indebted to a series of articles by A. A. Watts, in the Literary Gazette, February and March, 1821; and to the notes to the late Professor E. Kolbing's Siege of Corinth.

On behalf of the publisher, I beg to acknowledge[x] the kindness of Lord Glenesk, and of Sir Theodore Martin, K.C.B., who have permitted the examination and collation of MSS. of the Siege of Corinth and of the "Thyrza" poems, in their possession.

The original of the miniature of H.R.H. the Princess Charlotte of Wales (see p. 44) is in the Library of Windsor Castle. It has been reproduced for this volume by the gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen.

CONTENTS OF VOL. III.
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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INTRODUCTION TO THE OCCASIONAL PIECES
(POEMS 1809-1813; POEMS 1814-1816).
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The Poems afterwards entitled "Occasional Pieces," which were included in the several editions of the Collected Works issued by Murray, 1819-1831, numbered fifty-seven in all. They may be described as the aggregate of the shorter poems written between the years 1809-1818, which the author thought worthy of a permanent place among his poetical works. Of these the first twenty-nine appeared in successive editions of Childe Harold (Cantos I., II.) «viz. fourteen in the first edition, twenty in the second, and twenty-nine in the seventh edition», while the thirtieth, the Ode on the Death of Sir Peter Parker, was originally attached to Hebrew Melodies. The remaining twenty-seven pieces consist of six poems first published in the Second Edition of the Corsair, 1814; eleven which formed the collection entitled "Poems," 1816; six which were appended to the Prisoner of Chillon, December, 1816; the Very Mournful Ballad, and the Sonnet by Vittorelli, which accompanied the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold, 1818; the Sketch, first included by Murray in his edition of 1819; and the Ode to Venice, which appeared in the same volume as Mazeppa.

Thus matters stood till 1831, when seventy new poems (sixty had been published by Moore, in Letters and Journals, 1830, six were republished from Hobhouse's Imitations and Translations, 1809, and four derived from other sources) were included in a sixth volume of the Collected Works.[xx]

In the edition of 1832-35, twenty-four new poems were added, but four which had appeared in Letters and Journals, 1830, and in the sixth volume of the edition of 1831 were omitted. In the one-volume edition (first issued in 1837 and still in print), the four short pieces omitted in 1832 once more found a place, and the lines on "John Keats," first published in Letters and Journals, and the two stanzas to Lady Caroline Lamb, "Remember thee! remember thee," first printed by Medwin, in the Conversations of Lord Byron, 1824, were included in the Collection.

The third volume of the present issue includes all minor poems (with the exception of epigrams and jeux d'esprit reserved for the sixth volume) written after Byron's departure for the East in July, 1809, and before he left England for good in April, 1816.

The "Separation" and its consequent exile afforded a pretext and an opportunity for the publication of a crop of spurious verses. Of these Madame Lavalette (first published in the Examiner, January 21, 1816, under the signature B.B., and immediately preceding a genuine sonnet by Wordsworth, "How clear, how keen, how marvellously bright!") and Oh Shame to thee, Land of the Gaul! included by Hone, in Poems on his Domestic Circumstances, 1816; and Farewell to England, Ode to the Isle of St. Helena, To the Lily of France, On the Morning of my Daughter's Birth, published by J. Johnston, 1816, were repudiated by Byron, in a letter to Murray, dated July 22, 1816. A longer poem entitled The Tempest, which was attached to the spurious Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, published by Johnston, "the Cheapside impostor," in 1817, was also denounced by Byron as a forgery in a letter to Murray, dated December 16, 1816.

The Triumph of the Whale, by Charles Lamb, and the Enigma on the Letter H, by Harriet Fanshawe, were often included in piratical editions of Byron's Poetical Works. Other attributed poems which found their way into newspapers and foreign editions, viz. (i.) To my dear Mary Anne, 1804, "Adieu to sweet Mary for ever;" and (ii.) To Miss Chaworth, "Oh, memory, torture me no more," 1804, published in Works of Lord Byron, Paris, 1828; (iii.) lines written In the Bible, "Within this awful volume lies," quoted[xxi] in Life, Writings, Opinions, etc., 1825, iii. 414; (iv.) lines addressed to (?) George Anson Byron, "And dost thou ask the reason of my sadness?" Nicnac, March 29, 1823; (v.) To Lady Caroline Lamb, "And sayst thou that I have not felt," published in Works, etc., 1828; (vi.) lines To her who can best understand them, "Be it so, we part for ever," published in the Works of Lord Byron, In Verse and Prose, Hartford, 1847; (vii.) Lines found in the Travellers' Book at Chamouni, "How many numbered are, how few agreed!" published Works, etc., 1828; and (viii.) a second copy of verses with the same title, "All hail, Mont Blanc! Mont-au-Vert, hail!" Life, Writings, etc., 1825, ii. 384; (ix.) Lines addressed by Lord Byron to Mr. Hobhouse on his Election for Westminster, "Would you get to the house by the true gate?" Works, etc., 1828; and (x.) Enigma on the Letter I, "I am not in youth, nor in manhood, nor age," Works, etc., Paris, p. 720, together with sundry epigrams, must, failing the production of the original MSS., be accounted forgeries, or, perhaps, in one or two instances, of doubtful authenticity.

The following poems: On the Quotation, "And my true faith" etc.; [Love and Gold]; Julian [a Fragment]; and On the Death of the Duke of Dorset, are now published for the first time from MSS. in the possession of Mr. John Murray.

POEMS 1809-1813.
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THE GIRL OF CADIZ.[1]

LINES WRITTEN IN AN ALBUM, AT MALTA.[e][4]

TO FLORENCE.[f]

10.

11.

STANZAS COMPOSED DURING A THUNDERSTORM.[h][5]

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

STANZAS WRITTEN IN PASSING THE
AMBRACIAN GULF.[i]

THE SPELL IS BROKE, THE CHARM IS FLOWN![m]

WRITTEN AFTER SWIMMING FROM SESTOS
TO ABYDOS.[7]

LINES IN THE TRAVELLERS' BOOK AT ORCHOMENUS.[9]

MAID OF ATHENS, ERE WE PART.[n]

FRAGMENT FROM THE "MONK OF ATHOS."[14]

[First published in the Life of Lord Byron,
by the Hon. Roden Noel, London, 1890, pp. 206, 207.]

LINES WRITTEN BENEATH A PICTURE.[15]

TRANSLATION OF THE FAMOUS GREEK WAR SONG,

CHORUS.

TRANSLATION OF THE ROMAIC SONG,

“Μπένω μεσ' τὸ περιβόλι
Ὡραιοτάτη Χαηδή,” κ.τ.λ.[18]

ON PARTING.

FAREWELL TO MALTA.[19]

NEWSTEAD ABBEY.

EPISTLE TO A FRIEND,[27]

IN ANSWER TO SOME LINES EXHORTING THE AUTHOR
TO BE CHEERFUL, AND TO "BANISH CARE."

TO THYRZA.[t][29]

AWAY, AWAY, YE NOTES OF WOE![ac][31]

ONE STRUGGLE MORE, AND I AM FREE.[ai]

EUTHANASIA.

AND THOU ART DEAD, AS YOUNG AND FAIR.[aq]

LINES TO A LADY WEEPING.[bk][35]

[MS. M. First published, Morning Chronicle, March 7, 1812
(Corsair, 1814, Second Edition).]

IF SOMETIMES IN THE HAUNTS OF MEN.[bl]

ON A CORNELIAN HEART WHICH WAS BROKEN.[36]

THE CHAIN I GAVE.

LINES WRITTEN ON A BLANK LEAF OF
THE PLEASURES OF MEMORY.[bm]

ADDRESS, SPOKEN AT THE OPENING OF
DRURY-LANE THEATRE, SATURDAY,
OCTOBER 10, 1812.[39]

PARENTHETICAL ADDRESS.[44]

VERSES FOUND IN A SUMMER-HOUSE
AT HALES-OWEN.[46]

REMEMBER THEE! REMEMBER THEE![48]

TO TIME.

TRANSLATION OF A ROMAIC LOVE SONG.

10.

11.

THOU ART NOT FALSE, BUT THOU ART FICKLE.[bu][50]

ON BEING ASKED WHAT WAS THE "ORIGIN OF LOVE."[bw]

ON THE QUOTATION,

REMEMBER HIM, WHOM PASSION'S POWER.[51]

10.

11.

12.

13.

IMPROMPTU, IN REPLY TO A FRIEND.[52]

SONNET.

FROM THE PORTUGUESE.

ANOTHER VERSION.

[Stanzas 1, 2 first published, Childe Harold, 1814 (Seventh Edition).
"Another Version," first published, 1832.]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] [These stanzas were inserted in the first draft of the First Canto of Childe Harold, after the eighty-sixth stanza. "The struggle 'gainst the Demon's sway" (see stanza lxxxiv.) had, apparently, resulted in victory, for the "unpremeditated lay" poured forth at the time betrays the youth and high spirits of the singer. But the inconsistency was detected in time, and the lines, To Inez, dated January 25, 1810, with their "touches of dreariest sadness," were substituted for the simple and cheerful strains of The Girl of Cadiz (see Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 75, note 1; Life, p. 151).]

[a] {1} For thou hast never lived to see.—[MS. M. erased.]

[b] {2} The Saxon maids——.—[MS. M.]

[2] [Compare Childe Harold, Canto I. stanza lviii. lines 8, 9, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 59, note 1.]

[3] {3} [For "Bolero," see Poetical Works, 1898, i. 492, note 1.]

[c]

Or tells with light and fairy hand
Her beads beneath the rays of Hesper.—[MS. M. erased.]

[d] ——the lovely Girl of Cadiz.—[MS. M.]

[e] {4} Written in an Album.—[Editions 1812-1831.]
Written in Mrs. Spencer S.'s——.—[MS. M. erased]
Written at the request of a lady in her memorandum book.—[MS. B. M.]
"Mrs. S. S.'s request."—[Erased. MS. B.M.]

[4] [The possessor of the album was, doubtless, Mrs. Spencer Smith, the "Lady" of the lines To Florence, "the sweet Florence" of the Stanzas composed during a Thunderstorm, and of the Stanzas written in passing through the Ambracian Gulf, and, finally, when "The Spell is broke, the Charm is flown," the "fair Florence" of stanzas xxxii., xxxiii. of the Second Canto of Childe Harold. In a letter to his mother, dated September 15, 1809, Byron writes, "This letter is committed to the charge of a very extraordinary woman, whom you have doubtless heard of, Mrs. Spencer Smith, of whose escape the Marquis de Salvo published a narrative a few years ago (Travels in the Year 1806, from Italy to England through the Tyrol, etc., containing the particulars of the liberation of Mrs. Spencer Smith from the hands of the French Police, London: 12mo, 1807). She has since been shipwrecked, and her life has been from its commencement so fertile in remarkable incidents, that in a romance they would appear improbable. She was born at Constantinople [circ. 1785], where her father, Baron Herbert, was Austrian Ambassador; married unhappily, yet has never been impeached in point of character; excited the vengeance of Buonaparte by a part in some conspiracy; several times risked her life; and is not yet twenty-five."

John Spencer Smith, the "Lady's" husband, was a younger brother of Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, the hero of the siege of Acre. He began life as a Page of Honour to Queen Charlotte, was, afterwards, attached to the Turkish Embassy, and (May 4, 1798) appointed Minister Plenipotentiary. On January 5, 1799, he concluded the treaty of defensive alliance with the Porte; and, October 30, 1799, obtained the freedom of the Black Sea for the English flag (see Remains of the late John Tweddell. London: 1815. See, too, for Mrs. Spencer Smith, Letters, 1898, i. 244, 245, note 1).]

[f] {5} To——.—[Editions 1812-1832.]

[g] {6} Through giant Danger's rugged path.—[MS. M.]

[h] {7} Stanzas—[1812.]

[5] Composed Octr. 11, 1809, during the night in a thunderstorm, when the guides had lost the road to Zitza, near the range of mountains formerly called Pindus, in Albania. [Editions 1812-1831.]

[This thunderstorm occurred during the night of the 11th October, 1809, when Lord Byron's guides had lost the road to Zitza, near the range of mountains formerly called Pindus, in Albania. Hobhouse, who had ridden on before the rest of the party, and arrived at Zitza just as the evening set in, describes the thunder as rolling "without intermission—the echoes of one peal had not ceased to roll in the mountains, before another tremendous crash burst over our heads, whilst the plains and the distant hills, visible through the cracks in the cabin, appeared in a perpetual blaze. The tempest was altogether terrific, and worthy of the Grecian Jove. Lord Byron, with the priest and the servants, did not enter our hut before three (in the morning). I now learnt from him that they had lost their way, ... and that after wandering up and down in total ignorance of their position, had, at last, stopped near some Turkish tombstones and a torrent, which they saw by the flashes of lightning. They had been thus exposed for nine hours. ... It was long before we ceased to talk of the thunderstorm in the plain of Zitza."—Travels in Albania, 1858, i. 70, 72; Childe Harold, Canto II. stanza xlviii., Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 129, note 1.]

[i] {11} Stanzas.—[1812.]

[j] {12} Had Bards but realms along with rhymes.—[MS. M.]

[k] Again we'd see some Antonies.—[MS. M.]

[l] Though Jove——.—[MS. M.]

[6] [Compare [A Woman's Hair] stanza 1, line 4, "I would not lose you for a world."—Poetical Works, 1898, i. 233.]

[m] Written at Athens.—[1812.]

[7] {13} On the 3rd of May, 1810, while the Salsette (Captain Bathurst) was lying in the Dardanelles, Lieutenant Ekenhead, of that frigate, and the writer of these rhymes, swam from the European shore to the Asiatic—by the by, from Abydos to Sestos would have been more correct. The whole distance, from the place whence we started to our landing on the other side, including the length we were carried by the current, was computed by those on board the frigate at upwards of four English miles, though the actual breadth is barely one. The rapidity of the current is such that no boat can row directly across, and it may, in some measure, be estimated from the circumstance of the whole distance being accomplished by one of the parties in an hour and five, and by the other in an hour and ten minutes. The water was extremely cold, from the melting of the mountain snows. About three weeks before, in April, we had made an attempt; but having ridden all the way from the Troad the same morning, and the water being of an icy chillness, we found it necessary to postpone the completion till the frigate anchored below the castles, when we swam the straits as just stated, entering a considerable way above the European, and landing below the Asiatic, fort. [Le] Chevalier says that a young Jew swam the same distance for his mistress; and Olivier mentions its having been done by a Neapolitan; but our consul, Tarragona, remembered neither of these circumstances, and tried to dissuade us from the attempt. A number of the Salsette's crew were known to have accomplished a greater distance; and the only thing that surprised me was that, as doubts had been entertained of the truth of Leander's story, no traveller had ever endeavoured to ascertain its practicability. [See letter to Drury, dated May 3; to his mother, May 24, 1810, etc. (Letters, 1898, i. 262, 275). Compare the well-known lines in Don Juan, Canto II. stanza cv.—

"A better swimmer you could scarce see ever,
He could perhaps have passed the Hellespont,
As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)
Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did."

Compare, too, Childe Harold, Canto IV. stanza clxxxiv. line 3, and the Bride of Abydos, Canto II. stanza i.: Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 461, note 2, et post, p. 178.]

[8] {14} [Hobhouse, who records the first attempt to cross the Hellespont, on April 16, and the successful achievement of the feat, May 3, 1810, adds the following note: "In my journal, in my friend's handwriting: 'The whole distance E. and myself swam was more than four miles—the current very strong and cold—some large fish near us when half across—we were not fatigued, but a little chilled—did it with little difficulty.—May, 6, 1810. Byron.'"—Travels in Albania, ii. 195.]

[9] {15} ["At Orchomenus, where stood the Temple of the Graces, I was tempted to exclaim, 'Whither have the Graces fled?' Little did I expect to find them here. Yet here comes one of them with golden cups and coffee, and another with a book. The book is a register of names.... Among these is Lord Byron's connected with some lines which I shall send you: 'Fair Albion,' etc." (See Travels in Italy, Greece, etc., by H. W. Williams, ii. 290, 291; Life, p. 101.)]

[n] Song.—[1812.]

[10] [The Maid of Athens was, it is supposed, the eldest of three sisters, daughters of Theodora Macri, the widow of a former English vice-consul. Byron and Hobhouse lodged at her house. The sisters were sought out and described by the artist, Hugh W. Williams, who visited Athens in May, 1817: "Theresa, the Maid of Athens, Catinco, and Mariana, are of middle stature.... The two eldest have black, or dark hair and eyes; their visage oval, and complexion somewhat pale, with teeth of pearly whiteness. Their cheeks are rounded, their noses straight, rather inclined to aquiline. The youngest, Mariana, is very fair, her face not so finely rounded, but has a gayer expression than her sisters', whose countenances, except when the conversation has something of mirth in it, may be said to be rather pensive. Their persons are elegant, and their manners pleasing and lady-like, such as would be fascinating in any country. They possess very considerable powers of conversation, and their minds seem to be more instructed than those of the Greek women in general."—Travels in Italy, Greece, etc., ii. 291, 292.

Other travellers, Hughes, who visited Athens in 1813, and Walsh (Narrative of a Resident in Constantinople, i. 122), who saw Theresa in 1821, found her charming and interesting, but speak of her beauty as a thing of the past. "She married an Englishman named Black, employed in H.M. Consular Service at Mesolonghi. She survived her husband and fell into great poverty.... Theresa Black died October 15, 1875, aged 80 years." (See Letters, 1898, i. 269, 270, note 1; and Life, p. 105, note.)

"Maid of Athens" is possibly the best-known of Byron's short poems, all over the English-speaking world. This is no doubt due in part to its having been set to music by about half a dozen composers—the latest of whom was Gounod.]

[11] {16} Romaic expression of tenderness. If I translate it, I shall affront the gentlemen, as it may seem that I supposed they could not; and if I do not, I may affront the ladies. For fear of any misconstruction on the part of the latter, I shall do so, begging pardon of the learned. It means, "My life, I love you!" which sounds very prettily in all languages, and is as much in fashion in Greece at this day as, Juvenal tells us, the two first words were amongst the Roman ladies, whose erotic expressions were all Hellenised. [The reference is to the Ζωή καὶ Ψχὴ of Roman courtesans. Vide Juvenal, lib. ii., Sat. vi. line 195; Martial, Epig. x. 68. 5.]

[12] {17} In the East (where ladies are not taught to write, lest they should scribble assignations), flowers, cinders, pebbles, etc., convey the sentiments of the parties, by that universal deputy of Mercury—an old woman. A cinder says, "I burn for thee;" a bunch of flowers tied with hair, "Take me and fly;" but a pebble declares—what nothing else can. [Compare The Bride of Abydos, line 295—

"What! not receive my foolish flower?"

See, too, Medwin's story of "one of the principal incidents in The Giaour." "I was in despair, and could hardly contrive to get a cinder, or a token-flower sent to express it."—Conversations of Lord Byron, 1824, p. 122.]

[13] Constantinople. [Compare—

"Tho' I am parted, yet my mind
That's more than self still stays behind."

Poems, by Thomas Carew, ed. 1640, p. 36.]

[14] {18} [Given to the Hon. Roden Noel by S. McCalmont Hill, who inherited it from his great-grandfather, Robert Dallas. No date or occasion of the piece has been recorded.—Life of Lord Byron, 1890, p. 5.]

[15] {19} [These lines are copied from a leaf of the original MS. of the Second Canto of Childe Harold. They are headed, "Lines written beneath the Picture of J.U.D."

In a curious work of doubtful authority, entitled, The Life, Writings, Opinions and Times of the Right Hon. G. G. Noel Byron, London, 1825 (iii. 123-132), there is a long and circumstantial narrative of a "defeated" attempt of Byron's to rescue a Georgian girl, whom he had bought in the slave-market for 800 piastres, from a life of shame and degradation. It is improbable that these verses suggested the story; and, on the other hand, the story, if true, does afford some clue to the verses.]

[16] {20} The song Δεῦτε παῖδες, etc., was written by Riga, who perished in the attempt to revolutionize Greece. This translation is as literal as the author could make it in verse. It is of the same measure as that of the original. [For the original, see Poetical Works, 1891, Appendix, p. 792. For Constantine Rhigas, see Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 199, note 2. Hobhouse (Travels in Albania, 1858, ii. 3) prints a version (Byron told Murray that it was "well enough," Letters, 1899, iii. 13) of Δεῦτε παῖδες of his own composition. He explains in a footnote that the metre is "a mixed trochaic, except the chorus." "This song," he adds, "the chorus particularly, is sung to a tune very nearly the same as the Marseillois Hymn. Strangely enough, Lord Byron, in his translation, has entirely mistaken the metre." The first stanza runs as follows:—

"Greeks arise! the day of glory
Comes at last your swords to claim.
Let us all in future story
Rival our forefathers' fame.
Underfoot the yoke of tyrants
Let us now indignant trample,
Mindful of the great example,
And avenge our country's shame."]

[17] {21} Constantinople. "Ἑπτάλοφος."

[18] {22} The song from which this is taken is a great favourite with the young girls of Athens of all classes. Their manner of singing it is by verses in rotation, the whole number present joining in the chorus. I have heard it frequently at our "χόροι" in the winter of 1810-11. The air is plaintive and pretty.

[o] {23} Has bound my soul to thee——[MS. M.]

[p] When wandering forth alone——[MS. M.]

[q] {24}

Oh! what can tongue or pen avail
Unless my heart could speak.—[MS. M.]

[19] [These lines, which are undoubtedly genuine, were published for the first time in the sixth edition of Poems on his Domestic Circumstances (W. Hone, 1816). They were first included by Murray in the collected Poetical Works, in vol. xvii., 1832.]

[20] ["The principal streets of the city of Valetta are flights of stairs."—Gazetteer of the World.]

[21] {25} [Major-General Hildebrand Oakes (1754-1822) succeeded Admiral Sir Richard Goodwin Keates as "his Majesty's commissioner for the affairs of Malta," April 27, 1810. There was an outbreak of plague during his tenure of office (1810-13).—Annual Register, 1810, p. 320; Dict. Nat. Biog., art. "Oakes."]

[22] ["Lord Byron ... was once rather near fighting a duel—and that was with an officer of the staff of General Oakes at Malta" (1809).—Westminster Review, January, 1825, iii. 21 (by J. C. Hobhouse). (See, too, Life (First Edition, 1830, 4to), i. 202, 222.)]

[23] [On March 13, 1811, Captain (Sir William) Hoste (1780-1828) defeated a combined French and Italian squadron off the island of Lissa, on the Dalmatian coast. "The French commodore's ship La Favorite was burnt, himself (Dubourdieu) being killed." The four victorious frigates with their prizes arrived at Malta, March 31, when the garrison "ran out unarmed to receive and hail them." The Volage, in which Byron returned to England, took part in the engagement. Captain Hoste had taken a prize off Fiume in the preceding year.—Annual Register, 1811; Memoirs and Letters of Sir W. Hoste, ii. 79.]

[24] {26} ["We have had balls and fetes given us by all classes here, and it is impossible to convey to you the sensation our success has given rise to."—Memoirs and Letters of Sir W. Hoste, ii. 82.]

[25] [Mrs. (Susan) Fraser published, in 1809, "Camilla de Florian (the scene is laid in Valetta) and Other Poems. By an Officer's Wife." Byron was, no doubt, struck by her admiration for Macpherson's Ossian, and had read with interest her version of "The Address to the Sun," in Carthon, p. 31 (see Poetical Works, 1898, i. 229). He may, too, have regarded with favour some stanzas in honour of the Bolero (p. 82), which begin, "When, my Love, supinely laying."]

[26] {27} [Byron left Malta for England June 13, 1811. (See Letter to H. Drury, July 17, 1811, Letters, 1898, i. 318.)]

[r] {28} And mine was the pride and the worth of a name—[MS. M.]

[s] It tells not of time——.—[MS. M.]

[27] Francis Hodgson.

[28] {30} [Hodgson stipulated that the last twelve lines should be omitted, but Moore disregarded his wishes, and included the poem as it stands in his Life. A marginal note ran thus: "N.B. The poor dear soul meant nothing of this. F.H."—Memoir of Rev. Francis Hodgson, 1878, i. 212.]

[t] On the death of——Thyrza.—[MS.]

[29] [The following note on the identity of Thyrza has been communicated to the Editor:—

"The identity of Thyrza and the question whether the person addressed under this name really existed, or was an imaginary being, have given rise to much speculation and discussion of a more or less futile kind.
"This difficulty is now incapable of definite and authoritative solution, and the allusions in the verses in some respects disagree with things said by Lord Byron later. According to the poems, Thyrza had met him

"' ... many a day
In these, to me, deserted towers.'

(Newstead, October 11, 1811.)

"'When stretched on fever's sleepless bed.'

(At Patras, about September, 1810.)

"'Death for thee
Prepared a light and pangless dart.'

"'And oft I thought at Cynthia's noon,
When sailing o'er the Ægean wave,
"Now Thyrza gazes on that moon"—
Alas, it gleam'd upon her grave!'

(One struggle more, and I am free.)
"Finally, in the verses of October 11, 1811—

"'The pledge we wore—I wear it still,
But where is thine?—Ah! where art thou?'

"There can be no doubt that Lord Byron referred to Thyrza in conversation with Lady Byron, and probably also with Mrs. Leigh, as a young girl who had existed, and the date of whose death almost coincided with Lord Byron's landing in England in 1811. On one occasion he showed Lady Byron a beautiful tress of hair, which she understood to be Thyrza's. He said he had never mentioned her name, and that now she was gone his breast was the sole depository of that secret. 'I took the name of Thyrza from Gesner. She was Abel's wife.'
"Thyrza is mentioned in a letter from Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire, to Augustus Foster (London, May 4, 1812): 'Your little friend, Caro William (Lady Caroline Lamb), as usual, is doing all sorts of imprudent things for him (Lord Byron) and with him; he admires her very much, but is supposed by some to admire our Caroline (the Hon. Mrs. George Lamb) more; he says she is like Thyrsa, and her singing is enchantment to him.' From this extract it is obvious that Thyrza is alluded to in the following lines, which, with the above quotation, may be reproduced, by kind permission of Mr. Vere Foster, from his most interesting book, The Two Duchesses (1898, pp. 362-374).
"'Verses Addressed by Lord Byron in the year 1812
to the Hon. Mrs. George Lamb.

The sacred song that on my ear
Yet vibrates from that voice of thine
I heard before from one so dear,
'Tis strange it still appears divine.
But oh! so sweet that look and tone
To her and thee alike is given;
It seemed as if for me alone
That both had been recalled from Heaven.
And though I never can redeem
The vision thus endeared to me,
I scarcely can regret my dream
When realized again by thee.'"

(It may be noted that the name Thirza, or Thyrza, a variant of Theresa, had been familiar to Byron in his childhood. In the Preface to Cain he writes, "Gesner's Death of Abel! I have never read since I was eight years of age at Aberdeen. The general impression of my recollection is delight; but of the contents I remember only that Cain's wife was called Mahala, and Abel's Thirza." Another and more immediate suggestion of the name may be traced to the following translation of Meleager's Epitaphium In Heliodoram, which one of the "associate bards," Bland, or Merivale, or Hodgson, contributed to their Translations chiefly from the Greek Anthology, 1806, p. 4, a work which Byron singles out for commendation in English Bards, etc, (lines 881-890):—

"Tears o'er my parted Thyrza's grave I shed,
Affection's fondest tribute to the dead.

Break, break my heart, o'ercharged with bursting woe
An empty offering to the shades below!
Ah, plant regretted! Death's remorseless power,
With dust unfruitful checked thy full-blown flower.
Take, earth, the gentle inmate to thy breast,
And soft-embosomed let my Thyrza rest."

The MSS. of "To Thyrza," "Away, away, ye notes of Woe!" "One struggle more, and I am free," and, "And thou art dead, as young and fair," which belonged originally to Mrs. Leigh, are now in the possession of Sir Theodore Martin, K.C.B.—Editor.)]

[30] [For the substitution in the present issue of continuous lines for stanzas, Byron's own authority and mandate may be quoted. "In reading the 4th vol.... I perceive that piece 12 ('Without a Stone') is made nonsense of (that is, greater nonsense than usual) by dividing it into stanzas 1, 2, etc."—Letter to John Murray, August 26, 1815, Letters, 1899, iii. 215.]

[u] And soothe if such could soothe thy shade.—[MS. erased.]

[v] {31} By many a land——.—[MS.]

[w] {33} And shall they not——.—[MS.]

[x] ——the walk aside.—[MS.]

[y]

(a) The kiss that left no sting behind
So guiltless Passion thus forbore;
Those eyes bespoke so pure a mind,
That Love forgot to { plead ask } for more.

(b) The kiss that left no sting behind,
So guiltless Love each wish forebore;
Those eyes proclaimed so pure a mind,
That Passion blushed to smile for more.—
[Pencilled alternative stanzas.]

[z] {34} Well hast thou fled——.—[MS. erased.]

[aa]

If judging from my present pain
That rest alone——.—[MS. erased.]
If rest alone is in the tomb.—[MS.]

[ab] So let it be my hope in Heaven.—[MS. erased]

[ac] {35} Stanzas.—[MS. Editions 1812-1832.]

[31] ["I wrote it a day or two ago, on hearing a song of former days."—Letter to Hodgson, December 8, 1811, Letters, 1898, ii. 82.]

[ad] I dare not hear——.—[MS. erased.]

[ae] But hush the chords——.—[MS. erased.]

[af] ——I dare not gaze.—[MS. erased.]

[ag] The voice that made that song more sweet.—[MS.]

[ah] 'Tis silent now——.—[MS.]

[ai] {36} To Thyrza.—[Editions 1812-1831.]

[aj]

From pangs that tear——.—[MS.]
Such pangs that tear——.—[MS. erased.]

[ak] With things that moved me not before.—[MS. erased.]

[al] What sorrow cannot——.—[MS.]

[am]

It would not be, so hadst not thou
Withdrawn so soon——.—[MS. erased.]

[an] {38} —how oft I said.—[MS. erased.]

[ao]

Like freedom to the worn-out slave.—[MS.]
But Health and life returned and gave,
A boon 'twas idle then to give,
Relenting Health in mocking gave.—[MS. B. M. erased.]

[32] [Compare My Epitaph: "Youth, Nature and relenting Jove."—Letter to Hodgson, October 3, 1810, Letters, 1898, i. 298.]

[ap] Dear simple gift——.—[MS. erased.]

[33] {39} Compare A Wish, by Matthew Arnold, stanza 3, etc.—

"Spare me the whispering, crowded room,
The friends who come and gape and go," etc.

[aq] {41} Stanzas.—[Editions 1812-1831.]

[34] ["The Lovers' Walk is terminated with an ornamental urn, inscribed to Miss Dolman, a beautiful and amiable relation of Mr. Shenstone's, who died of the small-pox, about twenty-one years of age, in the following words on one side:—

'Peramabili consobrinæ
M.D.'

On the other side—

'Ah! Maria!
pvellarvm elegantissima!
ah Flore venvstatis abrepta,
vale!
hev qvanto minvs est
cvm reliqvis versari
qvam tui
meminisse.'"

(From a Description of the Leasowes, by A. Dodsley; Poetical Works of William Shenstone [1798], p. xxix.)]

[ar]

Are mingled with the Earth.—[MS.]
Were never meant for Earth.—[MS. erased.]

[as] Unhonoured with the vulgar dread.—[MS. erased.]

[at] {42}

I will not ask where thou art laid,
Nor look upon the name.—[MS. erased.]

[au] So I shall know it not.—[MS. erased.]

[av] Like common dust can rot.—[MS.]

[aw] I would not wish to see nor touch.—[MS. erased.]

[ax] As well as warm as thou.—[MS. erased.]

[ay] MS. transposes lines 5 and 6 of stanza 3.

[az] Nor frailty disavow.—[MS.]

[ba] Nor canst thou fair and faultless see.—[MS. erased.]

[bb] Nor wrong, nor change, nor fault in me.—[MS.]

[bc] {43} The cloud that cheers——.—[MS.]

[bd] The sweetness of that silent deep.—[MS.]

[be]

The flower in beauty's bloom unmatched
Is still the earliest prey.—[MS.]
The rose by some rude fingers snatched,
Is earliest doomed to fade.—[MS. erased.]

[bf] I do not deem I could have borne.—[MS.]

[bg]

But night and day of thine are passed,
And thou wert lovely to the last;
Destroyed——.—[MS. erased.]

[bh] {44} As stars that seem to quit the sky.—[MS.]

[bi]

O how much less it were to gain,
All beauteous though they be.—[MS.]

[bj] Through dark and dull Eternity.—[MS.]

[bk] {45} Sympathetic Address to a Young Lady.— [Morning Chronicle, March 7, 1812.]

[35] [The scene which begat these memorable stanzas was enacted at a banquet at Carlton House, February 22, 1812. On March 6 the following quatrain, entitled, "Impromptu on a Recent Incident," appeared in the Morning Chronicle:—

"Blest omens of a happy reign,
In swift succession hourly rise,
Forsaken friends, vows made in vain—
A daughter's tears, a nation's sighs."

Byron's lines, headed, "Sympathetic Address to a Young Lady," were published anonymously in the Morning Chronicle of March 7, but it was not till March 10 that the Courier ventured to insert a report of "The Fracas at Carlton House on the 22nd ult.," which had already been communicated to the Caledonian Mercury.

"The party consisted of the Princess Charlotte, the Duchess of York, the Dukes of York and Cambridge, Lords Moira, Erskine, Lauderdale, Messrs. Adams and Sheridan.
"The Prince Regent expressed 'his surprise and mortification' at the conduct of Lords Grey and Grenville [who had replied unfavourably to a letter addressed by the P.R. to the Duke of York, suggesting an united administration]. Lord Lauderdale thereupon, with a freedom unusual in courts, asserted that the reply did not express the opinions of Lords Grey and Grenville only, but of every political friend of that way of thinking, and that he had been present at and assisted in the drawing-up, and that every sentence had his cordial assent. The Prince was suddenly and deeply affected by Lord Lauderdale's reply, so much so, that the Princess, observing his agitation, dropt her head and burst into tears—upon which the Prince turned round and begged the female part of the company to withdraw."

In the following June, at a ball at Miss Johnson's, Byron was "presented by order to our gracious Regent, who honoured me with some conversation," and for a time he ignored and perhaps regretted his anonymous jeu d'esprit. But early in 1814, either out of mere bravado or in an access of political rancour, he determined to republish the stanzas under his own name. The first edition of the Corsair was printed, if not published, but in accordance with a peremptory direction (January 22, 1814), "eight lines on the little Royalty weeping in 1812," were included among the poems printed at the end of the second edition.

The "newspapers were in hysterics and town in an uproar on the avowal and republication" of the stanzas (Diary, February 18), and during Byron's absence from town "Murray omitted the Tears in several of the copies"—that is, in the Third Edition—but yielding to force majeure, replaced them in a Fourth Edition, which was issued early in February. (See Letters of July 6, 1812, January 22, February 2, and February 10, 1814 (Letters, 1898, ii. 134, etc.); and for "Newspaper Attacks upon Byron," see Letters, 1898, ii. Appendix VII. pp. 463-492.)]

[bl] Stanzas.—[1812.]

[36] {48} [For allusion to the "Cornelian" see "The Cornelian," ["Pignus Amoris"], and "The Adieu," stanza 7, Poetical Works, 1898, i. 66, 231, 240. See, too, Letters, 1898, i. 130, note 3.]

[bm] {50} To Samuel Rogers, Esq.—[Poems, 1816.]

[37] ["Rogers is silent,—and, it is said, severe. When he does talk, he talks well; and, on all subjects of taste, his delicacy of expression is pure as his poetry. If you enter his house—his drawing-room—his library—you of yourself say, this is not the dwelling of a common mind. There is not a gem, a coin, a book thrown aside on his chimney-piece, his sofa, his table, that does not bespeak an almost fastidious elegance in the possessor."—Diary, 1813; Letters, 1898, ii. 331.]

[38] [Compare Collins' Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson—"In yonder grave a Druid lies."]

[39] {51} ["Mr. Elliston then came forward and delivered the following Prize address. We cannot boast of the eloquence of the delivery. It was neither gracefully nor correctly recited. The merits of the production itself we submit to the criticism of our readers. We cannot suppose that it was selected as the most poetical composition of all the scores that were submitted to the committee. But perhaps by its tenor, by its allusions to Garrick, to Siddons, and to Sheridan, it was thought most applicable to the occasion, notwithstanding its being in part unmusical, and in general tame."—Morning Chronicle, October 12, 1812.]

[40] ["By the by, the best view of the said fire [February 24, 1809] (which I myself saw from a house-top in Covent-garden) was at Westminster Bridge, from the reflection on the Thames."—Letter to Lord Holland, September 25, 1812, Letters, 1898, ii. 148.]

[bn]

As flashing far the new Volcano shone
And swept the skies with { meteors lightnings } not their own.
or, As flashed the volumed blaze, and { sadly ghastly } shone
The skies with lightnings awful as their own.—
[Letter to Lord Holland, Sept. 25, 1812.]
or, As glared each rising flash, and ghastly shone
The skies with lightnings awful as their own.—
[Letter to Lord Holland, Sept. 27, 1812.]

[bo] {52}

Till slowly ebbed the { lava of the spent volcanic } wave.
or, Till ebb'd the lava of { the burning that molten } wave,
And blackening ashes mark'd the Muse's grave.—
[Letter to Lord Holland, Sept. 28, 1812]

[bp] That scorns the scythe of Time, the torch of Flame.—[Letter to Lord Holland, Sept, 28, 1812.]

[bq] {53}

Far be from him that hour which asks in vain
Tears such as flow for Garrick in his strain;
or, Far be that hour that vainly asks in turn
Sad verse for him as { crowned his wept o'er } Garrick's urn.—
[Letter to Lord Holland, Sept. 30, 1812.]

[41] [Originally, "Ere Garrick died," etc. "By the by, one of my corrections in the fair copy sent yesterday has dived into the bathos some sixty fathom—

'When Garrick died, and Brinsley ceased to write.'

Ceasing to live is a much more serious concern, and ought not to be first; therefore I will let the old couplet stand, with its half rhymes 'sought' and 'wrote' [vide supra, variant ii.] Second thoughts in every thing are best, but, in rhyme, third and fourth don't come amiss.... I always scrawl in this way, and smooth as much as I can, but never sufficiently."—Letter to Lord Holland, September 26, 1812, Letters, 1898, ii. 150.]

[br]

Such are the names that here your plaudits sought,
When Garrick acted, and when Brinsley wrote.—[MS.]

[42] {54} [The following lines were omitted by the Committee:—

"Nay, lower still, the Drama yet deplores
That late she deigned to crawl upon all-fours.
When Richard roars in Bosworth for a horse,
If you command, the steed must come in course.
If you decree, the Stage must condescend
To soothe the sickly taste we dare not mend.
Blame not our judgment should we acquiesce,
And gratify you more by showing less.
Oh, since your Fiat stamps the Drama's laws,
Forbear to mock us with misplaced applause;
That public praise be ne'er again disgraced,
From { brutes to man recall babes and brutes redeem } a nation's taste;
Then pride shall doubly nerve the actor's powers,
When Reason's voice is echoed back with ours."

The last couplet but one was altered in a later copy, thus—

"The past reproach let present scenes refute,
Nor shift from man to babe, from babe to brute."

"Is Whitbread," wrote Lord Byron, "determined to castrate all my cavalry lines?... I do implore, for my own gratification, one lash on those accursed quadrupeds—'a long shot, Sir Lucius, if you love me.'"—Letter to Lord Holland, September 28, 1812, Letters, 1898, ii. 156. For "animal performers," vide ibid., note 1.]

[43] [Lines 66-69 were added on September 24, in a letter to Lord Holland.]

[44] {55} [The original of Dr. Busby's address, entitled "Monologue submitted to the Committee of Drury Lane Theatre," which was published in the Morning Chronicle, October 17, 1812, "will be found in the Genuine Rejected Addresses, as well as parodied in Rejected Addresses ('Architectural Atoms'). On October 14 young Busby forced his way on to the stage of Drury Lane, attempted to recite his father's address, and was taken into custody. On the next night, Dr. Busby, speaking from one of the boxes, obtained a hearing for his son, who could not, however, make his voice heard in the theatre.... To the failure of the younger Busby (himself a competitor and the author of an 'Unalogue'...) to make himself heard, Byron alludes in the stage direction, 'to be spoken in an inarticulate voice.'" (See Letters, 1898, ii. 176; and for Dr. Busby, see Poetical Works, 1898, i. 481, 485.) Busby's "Address" ran as follows:—

"When energising objects men pursue,
What are the prodigies they cannot do?
A magic edifice you here survey,
Shot from the ruins of the other day!
As Harlequin had smote the slumberous heap,
And bade the rubbish to a fabric leap.
Yet at that speed you'd never be amazed,
Knew you the zeal with which the pile was raised;
Nor even here your smiles would be represt,
Knew you the rival flame that fires our breast, 10
Flame! fire and flame! sad heart-appalling sounds,
Dread metaphors that ope our healing wounds—
A sleeping pang awakes—and——But away
With all reflections that would cloud the day
That this triumphant, brilliant prospect brings,
Where Hope reviving re-expands her wings;
Where generous joy exults, where duteous ardour springs.

If mighty things with small we may compare,
This spirit drives Britannia's conquering car,
Burns in her ranks and kindles every tar.
Nelson displayed its power upon the main,
And Wellington exhibits it in Spain;
Another Marlborough points to Blenheim's story,
And with its lustre, blends his kindred glory. 40

In Arms and Science long our Isle hath shone,
And Shakespeare—wondrous Shakespeare—reared a throne
For British Poesy—whose powers inspire
The British pencil, and the British lyre—
Her we invoke—her Sister Arts implore:
Their smiles beseech whose charms yourselves adore,
These if we win, the Graces too we gain—
Their dear, beloved, inseparable train;
Three who their witching arts from Cupid stole
And three acknowledged sovereigns of the soul: 50
Harmonious throng! with nature blending art!
Divine Sestetto! warbling to the heart
For Poesy shall here sustain the upper part.
Thus lifted gloriously we'll sweep along,
Shine in our music, scenery and song;
Shine in our farce, masque, opera and play,
And prove old Drury has not had her day,
Nay more—so stretch the wing the world shall cry,
Old Drury never, never soared so high.
'But hold,' you'll say, 'this self-complacent boast; 60
Easy to reckon thus without your host.'
True, true—that lowers at once our mounting pride;
'Tis yours alone our merit to decide;
'Tis ours to look to you, you hold the prize
That bids our great, our best ambitions rise.
A double blessing your rewards impart,
Each good provide and elevate the heart.
Our twofold feeling owns its twofold cause,
Your bounty's comfort—rapture your applause;
When in your fostering beam you bid us live, 70
You give the means of life, and gild the means you give."

Morning Chronicle, October 17, 1812.]

[45] {57} [Busby's translation of Lucretius (The Nature of Things, a Didascalie Poem) was published in 1813. Byron was a subscriber, and is mentioned in the preface as "one of the most distinguished poets of the age." The passage in question is, perhaps, taken from the Second Book, lines 880, 881, which Busby renders—

"Just as she quickens fuel into fire,
And bids it, flaming, to the skies aspire."]

[46] {59} [The Leasowes, the residence of the poet Shenstone, is near the village of Halesowen, in Shropshire.]

[47] [See Dryden's Cymon and Iphigenia, lines 84, 85.]

[48] [The sequel of a temporary liaison formed by Lord Byron during his career in London, occasioned this impromptu. On the cessation of the connection, the fair one [Lady C. Lamb: see Letters, 1898, ii. 451] called one morning at her quondam lover's apartments. His Lordship was from home; but finding Vathek on the table, the lady wrote in the first page of the volume the words, "Remember me!" Byron immediately wrote under the ominous warning these two stanzas.—Conversations of Lord Byron, by Thomas Medwin, 1824, pp. 329, 330.

In Medwin's work the euphemisms false and fiend are represented by asterisks.]

[49] {60} ["To Bd., Feb. 22, 1813.

"'Remember thee,' nay—doubt it not—
Thy Husband too may 'think' of thee!
By neither canst thou be forgot,
Thou false to him—thou fiend to me!

"'Remember thee'? Yes—yes—till Fate
In Lethe quench the guilty dream.
Yet then—e'en then—Remorse and Hate
Shall vainly quaff the vanquished stream."

From a MS. (in the possession of Mr. Hallam Murray) not in Byron's handwriting.]

[bs] {61} ——not confessed thy power.—[MS. M. erased.]

[bt] ——still forgets the hour.—[MS. M. erased.]

[bu] {64} Song.—[Childe Harold, 1814.]

[50] ["I send you some lines which may as well be called 'A Song' as anything else, and will do for your new edition."—B.—(MS. M.)]

[bv] But her who not——.—[MS. M.]

[bw] {65} To Ianthe.—[MS. M. Compare "The Dedication" to Childe Harold.]

[51] {67} [It is possible that these lines, as well as the Sonnets "To Genevra," were addressed to Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster.—See Letters, 1898, ii. 2, note 1; and Letters, 1899, iii. 8, note 1.]

[bx] To him who loves and her who loved.—[MS. M.]

[by] That trembling form——.—[MS. M.]

[bz]

Resigning thee, alas! I lost
Joys bought too dear, if bright with tears,
Yet ne'er regret the pangs it cost.—[MS. M. erased.]

[ca] And crush——.—[MS. M.]

[cb] And I been not unworthy thee.—[MS. M.]

[cc] Long may thy days——.—[MS. M.]

[cd] Might make my hope of guilty joy.—[MS.]

[52] [Byron forwarded these lines to Moore in a postscript to a letter dated September 27, 1813. "Here's," he writes, "an impromptu for you by a 'person of quality,' written last week, on being reproached for low spirits."—Letters, 1898, ii. 268. They were written at Aston Hall, Rotherham, where he "stayed a week ... and behaved very well—though the lady of the house [Lady F. Wedderburn Webster] is young, and religious, and pretty, and the master is my particular friend."—Letters, 1898, ii. 267.]

[ce] {70} And bleed——.—[MS. M.]

[53] ["Redde some Italian, and wrote two Sonnets.... I never wrote but one sonnet before, and that was not in earnest, and many years ago, as an exercise—and I will never write another. They are the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions."—Diary, December 18, 1813; Letters, 1898, ii. 379.]

[cf] {71} ——Hope whispers not from woe.—[MS. M.]

[54]

["In moments to delight devoted
'My Life!' is still the name you give,
Dear words! on which my heart had doted
Had Man an endless term to live.
But, ah! so swift the seasons roll
That name must be repeated never,
For 'Life' in future say, 'My Soul,'
Which like my love exists for ever."

Byron wrote these lines in 1815, in Lady Lansdowne's album, at Bowood.—Note by Mr. Richard Edgecombe, Notes and Queries, Sixth Series, vii. 46.]

INTRODUCTION TO THE GIAOUR
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In a letter to Murray, dated Pisa, December 12, 1821 (Life, p. 545), Byron avows that the "Giaour Story" had actually "some foundation on facts." Soon after the poem appeared (June 5, 1813), "a story was circulated by some gentlewomen ... a little too close to the text" (Letters to Moore, September 1, 1813, Letters, 1898, ii. 258), and in order to put himself right with his friends or posterity, Byron wrote to his friend Lord Sligo, who in July, 1810, was anchored off Athens in "a twelve-gun brig, with a crew of fifty men" (see Letters, 1898, i. 289, note 1), requesting him to put on paper not so much the narrative of an actual event, but "what he had heard at Athens about the affair of that girl who was so near being put an end to while you were there." According to the letter which Moore published (Life, p. 178), and which is reprinted in the present issue (Letters, 1898, ii. 257), Byron interposed on behalf of a girl, who "in compliance with the strict letter of the Mohammedan law," had been sewn in a sack and was about to be thrown into the sea. "I was told," adds Lord Sligo, "that you then conveyed her in safety to the convent, and despatched her off at night to Thebes." The letter, which Byron characterizes as "curious," is by no means conclusive, and to judge from the designedly mysterious references in the Journal, dated November 16 and December 5, and in the second postscript to a letter to Professor Clarke, dated December 15, 1813 (Letters, 1898, ii. 321, 361, 311), "the circumstances which were the groundwork" are not before us. "An event," says John Wright (ed. 1832, ix. 145), "in which Lord Byron was personally concerned, undoubtedly supplied the groundwork of this tale; but for the [76] story so circumstantially set forth (see Medwin's Conversations, 1824, pp. 121, 124) of his having been the lover of this female slave, there is no foundation. The girl whose life the poet saved at Athens was not, we are assured by Sir John Hobhouse (Westminster Review, January, 1825, iii. 27), an object of his Lordship's attachment, but of that of his Turkish servant." Nevertheless, whatever Byron may have told Hobhouse (who had returned to England), and he distinctly says (Letters, 1898, ii. 393) that he did not tell him everything, he avowed to Clarke that he had been led "to the water's edge," and confided to his diary that to "describe the feelings of that situation was impossible—it is icy even to recollect them."

For the allusive and fragmentary style of the Giaour, The Voyage of Columbus, which Rogers published in 1812, is in part responsible. "It is sudden in its transitions," wrote the author, in the Preface to the first edition, "... leaving much to be imagined by the reader." The story or a part of it is told by a fellow-seaman of Columbus, who had turned "eremite" in his old age, and though the narrative itself is in heroic verse, the prologue and epilogue, as they may be termed, are in "the romance or ballad-measure of the Spanish." The resemblance between the two poems is certainly more than accidental. On the other hand, a vivid and impassioned description of Oriental scenery and customs was, as Gifford observed, new and original, and though, by his own admission, Byron was indebted to Vathek (or rather S. Henley's notes to Vathek) and to D'Herbelot's Bibliothèque Orientale for allusions and details, the "atmosphere" could only have been reproduced by the creative fancy of an observant and enthusiastic traveller who had lived under Eastern skies, and had come within ken of Eastern life and sentiment.

In spite, however, of his love for the subject-matter of his poem, and the facility, surprising even to himself, with which he spun his rhymes, Byron could not persuade himself that a succession of fragments would sort themselves and grow into a complete and connected whole. If his thrice-repeated depreciation of the Giaour is not entirely genuine, it is plain that he misdoubted himself. Writing to Murray (August 26, [77] 1813) he says, "I have, but with some difficulty, not added any more to this snake of a poem, which has been lengthening its rattles every month;" to Moore (September 1), "The Giaour I have added to a good deal, but still in foolish fragments;" and, again, to Moore (September 8), "By the coach I send you a copy of that awful pamphlet the Giaour."

But while the author doubted and apologized, or deprecated "his love's excess In words of wrong and bitterness," the public read, and edition followed edition with bewildering speed.

The Giaour was reviewed by George Agar Ellis in the Quarterly (No. xxxi., January, 1813 [published February 11, 1813]) and in the Edinburgh Review by Jeffrey (No. 54, January, 1813 [published February 24, 1813]). [78]

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ON THE GIAOUR
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The bibliography of the Giaour is beset with difficulties, and it is doubtful if more than approximate accuracy can be secured. The composition of the entire poem in its present shape was accomplished within six months, May-November, 1813, but during that period it was expanded by successive accretions from a first draft of 407 lines (extant in MS.) to a seventh edition of 1334 lines. A proof is extant of an edition of 28 pages containing 460 lines, itself an enlargement on the MS.; but whether (as a note in the handwriting of the late Mr. Murray affirms) this was or was not published is uncertain. A portion of a second proof of 38 pages has been preserved, but of the publication of the poem in this state there is no record. On June 5 a first edition of 41 pages, containing 685 lines, was issued, and of this numerous copies are extant. At the end of June, or the beginning of July, 1813, a second edition, entitled, a "New Edition with some Additions," appeared. This consisted of 47 pages, and numbered 816 lines. Among the accretions is to be found the famous passage beginning, "He that hath bent him o'er the dead." Two MS. copies of this pannus vere purpureus are in Mr. Murray's possession. At the end of July, and during the first half of August, two or more issues of a third edition were set up in type. The first issue amounted to 53 pages, containing 950 lines, was certainly published in this form, and possibly a second issue of 56 pages, containing 1004 lines, may have followed at a brief interval. A revise of this second issue, dated August 13, is extant. In the last fortnight of August a fourth edition of 58 pages, containing 1048 lines, undoubtedly saw the light. Scarcely more than a few days can have elapsed before a fifth edition of 66 pages, [79] containing 1215 lines, was ready to supplant the fourth edition. A sixth edition, a reproduction of the fifth, may have appeared in October. A seventh edition of 75 pages, containing 1334 lines, which presented the poem in its final shape, was issued subsequently to November 27, 1813 (a seventh edition was advertised in the Morning Chronicle, December 22, 1813), the date of the last revise, or of an advance copy of the issue. The ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth editions belong to 1814, while a fourteenth edition is known to have been issued in 1815. In that year and henceforward the Giaour was included in the various collected editions of Byron's works. The subjoined table assigns to their several editions the successive accretions in their order as now published:—

NOTE.

The first edition is advertised in the Morning Chronicle, June 5; a third edition on August 11, 13, 16, 31; a fifth edition, with considerable additions, on September 11; on November 29 a "new edition;" and on December 27, 1813, a seventh edition, together with a repeated notice of the Bride of Abydos. These dates do not exactly correspond with Murray's contemporary memoranda of the dates of the successive issues.[81]

ADVERTISEMENT.
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The tale which these disjointed fragments present, is founded upon circumstances now less common in the East than formerly; either because the ladies are more circumspect than in the "olden time," or because the Christians have better fortune, or less enterprise. The story, when entire, contained the adventures of a female slave, who was thrown, in the Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover, at the time the Seven Islands were possessed by the Republic of Venice, and soon after the Arnauts were beaten back from the Morea, which they had ravaged for some time subsequent to the Russian invasion. The desertion of the Mainotes, on being refused the plunder of Misitra, led to the abandonment of that enterprise, and to the desolation of the Morea, during which the cruelty exercised on all sides was unparalleled even in the annals of the faithful.[85]

THE GIAOUR.

No breath of air to break the wave
That rolls below the Athenian's grave,
That tomb [55] which, gleaming o'er the cliff,
First greets the homeward-veering skiff
High o'er the land he saved in vain;
When shall such Hero live again?

Fair clime! where every season smiles [cg]
[86] Benignant o'er those blessed isles,
Which, seen from far Colonna's height,
Make glad the heart that hails the sight,10
And lend to loneliness delight.
There mildly dimpling, Ocean's cheek
Reflects the tints of many a peak
Caught by the laughing tides that lave
These Edens of the eastern wave:
And if at times a transient breeze
Break the blue crystal of the seas,
Or sweep one blossom from the trees,
How welcome is each gentle air
That wakes and wafts the odours there!20
For there the Rose, o'er crag or vale,
Sultana of the Nightingale,[56]
[87]The maid for whom his melody,
His thousand songs are heard on high,
Blooms blushing to her lover's tale:
His queen, the garden queen, his Rose,
Unbent by winds, unchilled by snows,
Far from the winters of the west,
By every breeze and season blest,
Returns the sweets by Nature given30
In softest incense back to Heaven;
And grateful yields that smiling sky
Her fairest hue and fragrant sigh.
And many a summer flower is there,
And many a shade that Love might share,
And many a grotto, meant for rest,
That holds the pirate for a guest;
Whose bark in sheltering cove below
Lurks for the passing peaceful prow,
Till the gay mariner's guitar [57]40
Is heard, and seen the Evening Star;
[88]Then stealing with the muffled oar,
Far shaded by the rocky shore,
Rush the night-prowlers on the prey,
And turn to groans his roundelay.
Strange—that where Nature loved to trace,
As if for Gods, a dwelling place,
And every charm and grace hath mixed
Within the Paradise she fixed,
There man, enamoured of distress,50
Should mar it into wilderness,[ch]
And trample, brute-like, o'er each flower
That tasks not one laborious hour;
Nor claims the culture of his hand
To bloom along the fairy land,
But springs as to preclude his care,
And sweetly woos him—but to spare!
Strange—that where all is Peace beside,
There Passion riots in her pride,
And Lust and Rapine wildly reign60
To darken o'er the fair domain.
It is as though the Fiends prevailed
Against the Seraphs they assailed,
And, fixed on heavenly thrones, should dwell
The freed inheritors of Hell;
So soft the scene, so formed for joy,
So curst the tyrants that destroy!

He who hath bent him o'er the dead [ci][58]
Ere the first day of Death is fled,
[89]The first dark day of Nothingness,70
The last of Danger and Distress,
(Before Decay's effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where Beauty lingers,)
And marked the mild angelic air,
The rapture of Repose that's there,[cj]
The fixed yet tender traits that streak
The languor of the placid cheek,
And—but for that sad shrouded eye,
That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now,
[90]And but for that chill, changeless brow,80
Where cold Obstruction's apathy [59]
Appals the gazing mourner's heart,[ck]
As if to him it could impart
The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon;
Yes, but for these and these alone,
Some moments, aye, one treacherous hour,
He still might doubt the Tyrant's power;
So fair, so calm, so softly sealed,
The first, last look by Death revealed![60]
Such is the aspect of this shore;90
'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more![61]
So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,
We start, for Soul is wanting there.
Hers is the loveliness in death,
That parts not quite with parting breath;
[91] But beauty with that fearful bloom,
That hue which haunts it to the tomb,
Expression's last receding ray,
A gilded Halo hovering round decay,
The farewell beam of Feeling past away!100
Spark of that flame, perchance of heavenly birth,
Which gleams, but warms no more its cherished earth!

Clime of the unforgotten brave![62]
Whose land from plain to mountain-cave
Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave!
Shrine of the mighty! can it be,[cl]
That this is all remains of thee?
Approach, thou craven crouching slave:[63]
Say, is not this Thermopylæ?[cm]
These waters blue that round you lave,—110
Oh servile offspring of the free—
Pronounce what sea, what shore is this?
The gulf, the rock of Salamis!
These scenes, their story not unknown,
Arise, and make again your own;
Snatch from the ashes of your Sires
The embers of their former fires;
[92] And he who in the strife expires [cn]
Will add to theirs a name of fear
That Tyranny shall quake to hear,120
And leave his sons a hope, a fame,
They too will rather die than shame:
For Freedom's battle once begun,
Bequeathed by bleeding Sire to Son,[co]
Though baffled oft is ever won.
Bear witness, Greece, thy living page!
Attest it many a deathless age![cp]
While Kings, in dusty darkness hid,
Have left a nameless pyramid,
Thy Heroes, though the general doom130
Hath swept the column from their tomb,
A mightier monument command,
The mountains of their native land!
There points thy Muse to stranger's eye [cq]
The graves of those that cannot die!
'Twere long to tell, and sad to trace,
Each step from Splendour to Disgrace;
Enough—no foreign foe could quell
Thy soul, till from itself it fell;
Yet! Self-abasement paved the way140
To villain-bonds and despot sway.

What can he tell who treads thy shore?
No legend of thine olden time,
No theme on which the Muse might soar
High as thine own in days of yore,
[93] When man was worthy of thy clime.
The hearts within thy valleys bred,[cr]
The fiery souls that might have led
Thy sons to deeds sublime,
Now crawl from cradle to the Grave,150
Slaves—nay, the bondsmen of a Slave,[64]
And callous, save to crime;
Stained with each evil that pollutes
Mankind, where least above the brutes;
Without even savage virtue blest,
Without one free or valiant breast,
Still to the neighbouring ports they waft [cs]
Proverbial wiles, and ancient craft;
In this the subtle Greek is found,
For this, and this alone, renowned.160
In vain might Liberty invoke
The spirit to its bondage broke
Or raise the neck that courts the yoke:
No more her sorrows I bewail,
Yet this will be a mournful tale,
And they who listen may believe,
Who heard it first had cause to grieve.

Far, dark, along the blue sea glancing,
The shadows of the rocks advancing
[94] Start on the fisher's eye like boat170
Of island-pirate or Mainote;
And fearful for his light caïque,
He shuns the near but doubtful creek:[ct]
Though worn and weary with his toil,
And cumbered with his scaly spoil,
Slowly, yet strongly, plies the oar,
Till Port Leone's safer shore
Receives him by the lovely light
That best becomes an Eastern night.

Who thundering comes on blackest steed,[65]180
With slackened bit and hoof of speed?
Beneath the clattering iron's sound
The caverned Echoes wake around
In lash for lash, and bound for bound:
The foam that streaks the courser's side
Seems gathered from the Ocean-tide:
Though weary waves are sunk to rest,
There's none within his rider's breast;
And though to-morrow's tempest lower,
'Tis calmer than thy heart, young Giaour![66]190
[95]I know thee not, I loathe thy race,
But in thy lineaments I trace
What Time shall strengthen, not efface:
Though young and pale, that sallow front
Is scathed by fiery Passion's brunt;
Though bent on earth thine evil eye,[cu]
As meteor-like thou glidest by,
Right well I view and deem thee one
Whom Othman's sons should slay or shun.

On—on he hastened, and he drew200
My gaze of wonder as he flew:[cv]
Though like a Demon of the night
He passed, and vanished from my sight,
His aspect and his air impressed
A troubled memory on my breast,
And long upon my startled ear
Rung his dark courser's hoofs of fear.
He spurs his steed; he nears the steep,
That, jutting, shadows o'er the deep;
He winds around; he hurries by;210
The rock relieves him from mine eye;
For, well I ween, unwelcome he
Whose glance is fixed on those that flee;
And not a star but shines too bright
[96] On him who takes such timeless flight.[cw]
He wound along; but ere he passed
One glance he snatched, as if his last,
A moment checked his wheeling steed,[67]
A moment breathed him from his speed,
A moment on his stirrup stood—220
Why looks he o'er the olive wood?[cx]
The Crescent glimmers on the hill,
The Mosque's high lamps are quivering still
Though too remote for sound to wake
In echoes of the far tophaike,[68]
The flashes of each joyous peal
Are seen to prove the Moslem's zeal.
To-night, set Rhamazani's sun;
To-night, the Bairam feast's begun;
To-night—but who and what art thou230
Of foreign garb and fearful brow?
And what are these to thine or thee,
That thou shouldst either pause or flee?

He stood—some dread was on his face,
Soon Hatred settled in its place:
It rose not with the reddening flush
[97] Of transient Anger's hasty blush,[cy][69]
But pale as marble o'er the tomb,
Whose ghastly whiteness aids its gloom.
His brow was bent, his eye was glazed;240
He raised his arm, and fiercely raised,
And sternly shook his hand on high,
As doubting to return or fly;[cz]
Impatient of his flight delayed,
Here loud his raven charger neighed—
Down glanced that hand, and grasped his blade;
That sound had burst his waking dream,
As Slumber starts at owlet's scream.
The spur hath lanced his courser's sides;
Away—away—for life he rides:250
Swift as the hurled on high jerreed [70]
Springs to the touch his startled steed;
The rock is doubled, and the shore
Shakes with the clattering tramp no more;
The crag is won, no more is seen
[98] His Christian crest and haughty mien.
'Twas but an instant he restrained
That fiery barb so sternly reined;[da]
'Twas but a moment that he stood,
Then sped as if by Death pursued;260
But in that instant o'er his soul
Winters of Memory seemed to roll,
And gather in that drop of time
A life of pain, an age of crime.
O'er him who loves, or hates, or fears,
Such moment pours the grief of years:[db]
What felt he then, at once opprest
By all that most distracts the breast?
That pause, which pondered o'er his fate,
Oh, who its dreary length shall date!270
Though in Time's record nearly nought,
It was Eternity to Thought![71]
For infinite as boundless space
The thought that Conscience must embrace,
Which in itself can comprehend
Woe without name, or hope, or end.[72]
[99]

The hour is past, the Giaour is gone:
And did he fly or fall alone?[dc]
Woe to that hour he came or went!
The curse for Hassan's sin was sent280
To turn a palace to a tomb;
He came, he went, like the Simoom,[73]
That harbinger of Fate and gloom,
Beneath whose widely-wasting breath
The very cypress droops to death—
Dark tree, still sad when others' grief is fled,
The only constant mourner o'er the dead!

The steed is vanished from the stall;
No serf is seen in Hassan's hall;
The lonely Spider's thin gray pall [dd]290
Waves slowly widening o'er the wall;
[100] The Bat builds in his Haram bower,[74]
And in the fortress of his power
The Owl usurps the beacon-tower;
The wild-dog howls o'er the fountain's brim,
With baffled thirst, and famine, grim;
For the stream has shrunk from its marble bed,
Where the weeds and the desolate dust are spread.
'Twas sweet of yore to see it play
And chase the sultriness of day,300
As springing high the silver dew [de]
In whirls fantastically flew,
[101] And flung luxurious coolness round
The air, and verdure o'er the ground.
'Twas sweet, when cloudless stars were bright,
To view the wave of watery light,
And hear its melody by night.
And oft had Hassan's Childhood played
Around the verge of that cascade;
And oft upon his mother's breast310
That sound had harmonized his rest;
And oft had Hassan's Youth along
Its bank been soothed by Beauty's song;
And softer seemed each melting tone
Of Music mingled with its own.
But ne'er shall Hassan's Age repose
Along the brink at Twilight's close:
The stream that filled that font is fled—
The blood that warmed his heart is shed![df]
And here no more shall human voice320
Be heard to rage, regret, rejoice.
The last sad note that swelled the gale
Was woman's wildest funeral wail:
That quenched in silence, all is still,
But the lattice that flaps when the wind is shrill:
Though raves the gust, and floods the rain,
No hand shall close its clasp again.
On desert sands 'twere joy to scan
The rudest steps of fellow man,
So here the very voice of Grief330
Might wake an Echo like relief—[dg]
At least 'twould say, "All are not gone;
[102] There lingers Life, though but in one"—[dh]
For many a gilded chamber's there,
Which Solitude might well forbear;[75]
Within that dome as yet Decay
Hath slowly worked her cankering way—
But gloom is gathered o'er the gate,
Nor there the Fakir's self will wait;
Nor there will wandering Dervise stay,340
For Bounty cheers not his delay;
Nor there will weary stranger halt
To bless the sacred "bread and salt."[di][76]
Alike must Wealth and Poverty
[103] Pass heedless and unheeded by,
For Courtesy and Pity died
With Hassan on the mountain side.
His roof, that refuge unto men,
Is Desolation's hungry den.
The guest flies the hall, and the vassal from labour,350
Since his turban was cleft by the infidel's sabre![dj][77]

I hear the sound of coming feet,
But not a voice mine ear to greet;
More near—each turban I can scan,
And silver-sheathèd ataghan;[78]
The foremost of the band is seen
An Emir by his garb of green:[79]
"Ho! who art thou?"—"This low salam [80]
[104] Replies of Moslem faith I am.[dk]
The burthen ye so gently bear,360
Seems one that claims your utmost care,
And, doubtless, holds some precious freight—
My humble bark would gladly wait."[dl]

"Thou speakest sooth: thy skiff unmoor,
And waft us from the silent shore;
Nay, leave the sail still furled, and ply
The nearest oar that's scattered by,
And midway to those rocks where sleep
The channelled waters dark and deep.
Rest from your task—so—bravely done,370
Our course has been right swiftly run;
Yet 'tis the longest voyage, I trow,
That one of—[81] * * * "

Sullen it plunged, and slowly sank,
The calm wave rippled to the bank;
I watched it as it sank, methought
[105] Some motion from the current caught
Bestirred it more,—'twas but the beam
That checkered o'er the living stream:
I gazed, till vanishing from view,380
Like lessening pebble it withdrew;
Still less and less, a speck of white
That gemmed the tide, then mocked the sight;
And all its hidden secrets sleep,
Known but to Genii of the deep,
Which, trembling in their coral caves,
They dare not whisper to the waves.

As rising on its purple wing
The insect-queen [82] of Eastern spring,
O'er emerald meadows of Kashmeer390
Invites the young pursuer near,
And leads him on from flower to flower
A weary chase and wasted hour,
Then leaves him, as it soars on high,
With panting heart and tearful eye:
So Beauty lures the full-grown child,
With hue as bright, and wing as wild:
A chase of idle hopes and fears,
Begun in folly, closed in tears.
If won, to equal ills betrayed,[dm]400
Woe waits the insect and the maid;
[106] A life of pain, the loss of peace;
From infant's play, and man's caprice:
The lovely toy so fiercely sought
Hath lost its charm by being caught,
For every touch that wooed its stay
Hath brushed its brightest hues away,
Till charm, and hue, and beauty gone,
'Tis left to fly or fall alone.
With wounded wing, or bleeding breast,410
Ah! where shall either victim rest?
Can this with faded pinion soar
From rose to tulip as before?
Or Beauty, blighted in an hour,
Find joy within her broken bower?
No: gayer insects fluttering by
Ne'er droop the wing o'er those that die,
And lovelier things have mercy shown
To every failing but their own,
And every woe a tear can claim420
Except an erring Sister's shame.

The Mind, that broods o'er guilty woes,
Is like the Scorpion girt by fire;
In circle narrowing as it glows,[dn]
The flames around their captive close,
Till inly searched by thousand throes,
And maddening in her ire,
One sad and sole relief she knows—
The sting she nourished for her foes,
Whose venom never yet was vain,430
Gives but one pang, and cures all pain,
And darts into her desperate brain:
[107] So do the dark in soul expire,
Or live like Scorpion girt by fire;[83]
So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven,[do]
Unfit for earth, undoomed for heaven,
Darkness above, despair beneath,
Around it flame, within it death!

Black Hassan from the Haram flies,
Nor bends on woman's form his eyes;440
The unwonted chase each hour employs,
Yet shares he not the hunter's joys.
Not thus was Hassan wont to fly
When Leila dwelt in his Serai.
Doth Leila there no longer dwell?
That tale can only Hassan tell:
Strange rumours in our city say
Upon that eve she fled away
When Rhamazan's [84] last sun was set,
[108]And flashing from each Minaret450
Millions of lamps proclaimed the feast
Of Bairam through the boundless East.
'Twas then she went as to the bath,
Which Hassan vainly searched in wrath;
For she was flown her master's rage
In likeness of a Georgian page,
And far beyond the Moslem's power
Had wronged him with the faithless Giaour.
Somewhat of this had Hassan deemed;
But still so fond, so fair she seemed,460
Too well he trusted to the slave
Whose treachery deserved a grave:
And on that eve had gone to Mosque,
And thence to feast in his Kiosk.
Such is the tale his Nubians tell,
Who did not watch their charge too well;
But others say, that on that night,
By pale Phingari's [85] trembling light,
The Giaour upon his jet-black steed
Was seen, but seen alone to speed470
With bloody spur along the shore,
Nor maid nor page behind him bore.

Her eye's dark charm 'twere vain to tell,
But gaze on that of the Gazelle,
It will assist thy fancy well;
As large, as languishingly dark,
But Soul beamed forth in every spark
That darted from beneath the lid,
Bright as the jewel of Giamschid.[86]
[109]Yea, Soul, and should our prophet say480
That form was nought but breathing clay,
By Alla! I would answer nay;
Though on Al-Sirat's [87] arch I stood,
Which totters o'er the fiery flood,
[110] With Paradise within my view,
And all his Houris beckoning through.
Oh! who young Leila's glance could read
And keep that portion of his creed
Which saith that woman is but dust,
A soulless toy for tyrant's lust?[88]490
On her might Muftis gaze, and own
That through her eye the Immortal shone;
On her fair cheek's unfading hue
The young pomegranate's [89] blossoms strew
Their bloom in blushes ever new;
Her hair in hyacinthine flow,[90]
[111]When left to roll its folds below,
As midst her handmaids in the hall
She stood superior to them all,
Hath swept the marble where her feet500
Gleamed whiter than the mountain sleet
Ere from the cloud that gave it birth
It fell, and caught one stain of earth.
The cygnet nobly walks the water;
So moved on earth Circassia's daughter,
The loveliest bird of Franguestan![91]
As rears her crest the ruffled Swan,
And spurns the wave with wings of pride,
When pass the steps of stranger man
Along the banks that bound her tide;510
Thus rose fair Leila's whiter neck:—
Thus armed with beauty would she check
Intrusion's glance, till Folly's gaze
Shrunk from the charms it meant to praise.
Thus high and graceful was her gait;
Her heart as tender to her mate;
Her mate—stern Hassan, who was he?
Alas! that name was not for thee![92]

Stern Hassan hath a journey ta'en
With twenty vassals in his train,520
Each armed, as best becomes a man,
With arquebuss and ataghan;
[112] The chief before, as decked for war,
Bears in his belt the scimitar
Stained with the best of Arnaut blood,
When in the pass the rebels stood,
And few returned to tell the tale
Of what befell in Parne's vale.
The pistols which his girdle bore
Were those that once a Pasha wore,530
Which still, though gemmed and bossed with gold,
Even robbers tremble to behold.
'Tis said he goes to woo a bride
More true than her who left his side;
The faithless slave that broke her bower,
And—worse than faithless—for a Giaour!

The sun's last rays are on the hill,
And sparkle in the fountain rill,
Whose welcome waters, cool and clear,
Draw blessings from the mountaineer:540
Here may the loitering merchant Greek
Find that repose 'twere vain to seek
In cities lodged too near his lord,
And trembling for his secret hoard—
Here may he rest where none can see,
In crowds a slave, in deserts free;
And with forbidden wine may stain
The bowl a Moslem must not drain

The foremost Tartar's in the gap
Conspicuous by his yellow cap;550
The rest in lengthening line the while
Wind slowly through the long defile:
[113] Above, the mountain rears a peak,
Where vultures whet the thirsty beak,
And theirs may be a feast to-night,
Shall tempt them down ere morrow's light;
Beneath, a river's wintry stream
Has shrunk before the summer beam,
And left a channel bleak and bare,
Save shrubs that spring to perish there:560
Each side the midway path there lay
Small broken crags of granite gray,
By time, or mountain lightning, riven
From summits clad in mists of heaven;
For where is he that hath beheld
The peak of Liakura [93] unveiled?

They reach the grove of pine at last;
"Bismillah![94] now the peril's past;
For yonder view the opening plain,
And there we'll prick our steeds amain:"570
The Chiaus [95] spake, and as he said,
A bullet whistled o'er his head;
The foremost Tartar bites the ground!
Scarce had they time to check the rein,
[114] Swift from their steeds the riders bound;
But three shall never mount again:
Unseen the foes that gave the wound,
The dying ask revenge in vain.
With steel unsheathed, and carbine bent,
Some o'er their courser's harness leant,580
Half sheltered by the steed;
Some fly beneath the nearest rock,
And there await the coming shock,
Nor tamely stand to bleed
Beneath the shaft of foes unseen,
Who dare not quit their craggy screen.
Stern Hassan only from his horse
Disdains to light, and keeps his course,
Till fiery flashes in the van
Proclaim too sure the robber-clan590
Have well secured the only way
Could now avail the promised prey;
Then curled his very beard [96] with ire,
And glared his eye with fiercer fire;
"Though far and near the bullets hiss,
I've scaped a bloodier hour than this."
And now the foe their covert quit,
And call his vassals to submit;
But Hassan's frown and furious word
Are dreaded more than hostile sword,600
Nor of his little band a man
Resigned carbine or ataghan,
[115] Nor raised the craven cry, Amaun![97]
In fuller sight, more near and near,
The lately ambushed foes appear,
And, issuing from the grove, advance
Some who on battle-charger prance.
Who leads them on with foreign brand
Far flashing in his red right hand?
"'Tis he!'tis he! I know him now;610
I know him by his pallid brow;
I know him by the evil eye [98]
That aids his envious treachery;
I know him by his jet-black barb;
Though now arrayed in Arnaut garb,
Apostate from his own vile faith,
It shall not save him from the death:
'Tis he! well met in any hour,
Lost Leila's love—accursed Giaour!"

As rolls the river into Ocean,[99]620
In sable torrent wildly streaming;
As the sea-tide's opposing motion,
In azure column proudly gleaming,
Beats back the current many a rood,
In curling foam and mingling flood,
While eddying whirl, and breaking wave,
Roused by the blast of winter, rave;
Through sparkling spray, in thundering clash,
The lightnings of the waters flash
[116] In awful whiteness o'er the shore,630
That shines and shakes beneath the roar;
Thus—as the stream and Ocean greet,
With waves that madden as they meet—
Thus join the bands, whom mutual wrong,
And fate, and fury, drive along.
The bickering sabres' shivering jar;
And pealing wide or ringing near
Its echoes on the throbbing ear,
The deathshot hissing from afar;
The shock, the shout, the groan of war,640
Reverberate along that vale,
More suited to the shepherd's tale:
Though few the numbers—theirs the strife,
That neither spares nor speaks for life![dp]
Ah! fondly youthful hearts can press,
To seize and share the dear caress;
But Love itself could never pant
For all that Beauty sighs to grant
With half the fervour Hate bestows
Upon the last embrace of foes,650
When grappling in the fight they fold
Those arms that ne'er shall lose their hold:
Friends meet to part; Love laughs at faith;
True foes, once met, are joined till death!

With sabre shivered to the hilt,
Yet dripping with the blood he spilt;
Yet strained within the severed hand
Which quivers round that faithless brand;
His turban far behind him rolled,
[117]And cleft in twain its firmest fold;660
His flowing robe by falchion torn,
And crimson as those clouds of morn
That, streaked with dusky red, portend
The day shall have a stormy end;
A stain on every bush that bore
A fragment of his palampore;[100]
His breast with wounds unnumbered riven,
His back to earth, his face to Heaven,
Fall'n Hassan lies—his unclosed eye
Yet lowering on his enemy,670
As if the hour that sealed his fate [101]
Surviving left his quenchless hate;
And o'er him bends that foe with brow
As dark as his that bled below.

"Yes, Leila sleeps beneath the wave,
But his shall be a redder grave;
Her spirit pointed well the steel
Which taught that felon heart to feel.
He called the Prophet, but his power
Was vain against the vengeful Giaour:680
He called on Alla—but the word
Arose unheeded or unheard.
Thou Paynim fool! could Leila's prayer
Be passed, and thine accorded there?
I watched my time, I leagued with these,
The traitor in his turn to seize;
My wrath is wreaked, the deed is done,
And now I go—but go alone."

[118]

The browsing camels' bells are tinkling:[dq]
His mother looked from her lattice high—[102]690
She saw the dews of eve besprinkling
The pasture green beneath her eye,
She saw the planets faintly twinkling:
"'Tis twilight—sure his train is nigh."
She could not rest in the garden-bower,
But gazed through the grate of his steepest tower.
"Why comes he not? his steeds are fleet,
Nor shrink they from the summer heat;
Why sends not the Bridegroom his promised gift?
Is his heart more cold, or his barb less swift?700
Oh, false reproach! yon Tartar now
Has gained our nearest mountain's brow,
And warily the steep descends,
[119] And now within the valley bends;[dr]
And he bears the gift at his saddle bow—
How could I deem his courser slow?[ds]
Right well my largess shall repay
His welcome speed, and weary way."

The Tartar lighted at the gate,
But scarce upheld his fainting weight![dt]710
His swarthy visage spake distress,
But this might be from weariness;
His garb with sanguine spots was dyed,
But these might be from his courser's side;
He drew the token from his vest—
Angel of Death! 'tis Hassan's cloven crest!
His calpac [103] rent—his caftan red—
"Lady, a fearful bride thy Son hath wed:
Me, not from mercy, did they spare,
But this empurpled pledge to bear.720
Peace to the brave! whose blood is spilt:
Woe to the Giaour! for his the guilt."

A Turban [104] carved in coarsest stone,
A Pillar with rank weeds o'ergrown,
[120] Whereon can now be scarcely read
The Koran verse that mourns the dead,
Point out the spot where Hassan fell
A victim in that lonely dell.
There sleeps as true an Osmanlie
As e'er at Mecca bent the knee;730
As ever scorned forbidden wine,
Or prayed with face towards the shrine,
In orisons resumed anew
At solemn sound of "Alla Hu!"[105]
Yet died he by a stranger's hand,
And stranger in his native land;
Yet died he as in arms he stood,
And unavenged, at least in blood.
But him the maids of Paradise
Impatient to their halls invite,740
And the dark heaven of Houris' eyes
On him shall glance for ever bright;
They come—their kerchiefs green they wave,[106]
And welcome with a kiss the brave!
Who falls in battle 'gainst a Giaour
Is worthiest an immortal bower.

[121]

But thou, false Infidel! shall writhe
Beneath avenging Monkir's [107] scythe;
And from its torments 'scape alone
To wander round lost Eblis'[108] throne;750
And fire unquenched, unquenchable,
Around, within, thy heart shall dwell;
Nor ear can hear nor tongue can tell
The tortures of that inward hell!
But first, on earth as Vampire [109] sent,
[122]Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;760
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corse:
Thy victims ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire,
As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
But one that for thy crime must fall,
The youngest, most beloved of all,
Shall bless thee with a father's name—
That word shall wrap thy heart in flame!770
Yet must thou end thy task, and mark
Her cheek's last tinge, her eye's last spark,
[123] And the last glassy glance must view
Which freezes o'er its lifeless blue;
Then with unhallowed hand shalt tear
The tresses of her yellow hair,
Of which in life a lock when shorn
Affection's fondest pledge was worn,
But now is borne away by thee,
Memorial of thine agony!780
Wet with thine own best blood shall drip
Thy gnashing tooth and haggard lip;[110]
Then stalking to thy sullen grave,
Go—and with Gouls and Afrits rave;
Till these in horror shrink away
From Spectre more accursed than they!

"How name ye yon lone Caloyer?[111]
His features I have scanned before
[124]In mine own land: 'tis many a year,
Since, dashing by the lonely shore,790
I saw him urge as fleet a steed
As ever served a horseman's need.
But once I saw that face, yet then
It was so marked with inward pain,
I could not pass it by again;
It breathes the same dark spirit now,
As death were stamped upon his brow.[du]

"'Tis twice three years at summer tide
Since first among our freres he came;
And here it soothes him to abide800
For some dark deed he will not name.
But never at our Vesper prayer,
Nor e'er before Confession chair
Kneels he, nor recks he when arise
Incense or anthem to the skies,
But broods within his cell alone,
His faith and race alike unknown.
The sea from Paynim land he crost,
And here ascended from the coast;
Yet seems he not of Othman race,810
But only Christian in his face:
I'd judge him some stray renegade,
Repentant of the change he made,
Save that he shuns our holy shrine,
Nor tastes the sacred bread and wine.
Great largess to these walls he brought,
And thus our Abbot's favour bought;
[125] But were I Prior, not a day
Should brook such stranger's further stay,
Or pent within our penance cell820
Should doom him there for aye to dwell.
Much in his visions mutters he
Of maiden whelmed beneath the sea;[dv]
Of sabres clashing, foemen flying,
Wrongs avenged, and Moslem dying.
On cliff he hath been known to stand,
And rave as to some bloody hand
Fresh severed from its parent limb,
Invisible to all but him,
Which beckons onward to his grave,830
And lures to leap into the wave."

Dark and unearthly is the scowl
That glares beneath his dusky cowl:
The flash of that dilating eye
Reveals too much of times gone by;
Though varying, indistinct its hue,
Oft with his glance the gazer rue,
For in it lurks that nameless spell,
Which speaks, itself unspeakable,
A spirit yet unquelled and high,840
That claims and keeps ascendancy;
And like the bird whose pinions quake,
But cannot fly the gazing snake,
Will others quail beneath his look,
Nor 'scape the glance they scarce can brook.
From him the half-affrighted Friar
When met alone would fain retire,
[126] As if that eye and bitter smile
Transferred to others fear and guile:
Not oft to smile descendeth he,850
And when he doth 'tis sad to see
That he but mocks at Misery.
How that pale lip will curl and quiver!
Then fix once more as if for ever;
As if his sorrow or disdain
Forbade him e'er to smile again.
Well were it so—such ghastly mirth
From joyaunce ne'er derived its birth.
But sadder still it were to trace
What once were feelings in that face:860
Time hath not yet the features fixed,
But brighter traits with evil mixed;
And there are hues not always faded,
Which speak a mind not all degraded
Even by the crimes through which it waded:
The common crowd but see the gloom
Of wayward deeds, and fitting doom;
The close observer can espy
A noble soul, and lineage high:
Alas! though both bestowed in vain,870
Which Grief could change, and Guilt could stain,
It was no vulgar tenement
To which such lofty gifts were lent,
And still with little less than dread
On such the sight is riveted.
The roofless cot, decayed and rent,
Will scarce delay the passer-by;
The tower by war or tempest bent,
While yet may frown one battlement,
Demands and daunts the stranger's eye;880
Each ivied arch, and pillar lone,
Pleads haughtily for glories gone!
[127] "His floating robe around him folding,
Slow sweeps he through the columned aisle;
With dread beheld, with gloom beholding
The rites that sanctify the pile.
But when the anthem shakes the choir,
And kneel the monks, his steps retire;
By yonder lone and wavering torch
His aspect glares within the porch;890
There will he pause till all is done—
And hear the prayer, but utter none.
See—by the half-illumined wall [dw]
His hood fly back, his dark hair fall,
That pale brow wildly wreathing round,
As if the Gorgon there had bound
The sablest of the serpent-braid
That o'er her fearful forehead strayed:
For he declines the convent oath,
And leaves those locks unhallowed growth,900
But wears our garb in all beside;
And, not from piety but pride,
Gives wealth to walls that never heard
Of his one holy vow nor word.
Lo!—mark ye, as the harmony [dx]
Peals louder praises to the sky,
That livid cheek, that stony air
Of mixed defiance and despair!
Saint Francis, keep him from the shrine![dy]
[128]Else may we dread the wrath divine910
Made manifest by awful sign.
If ever evil angel bore
The form of mortal, such he wore;
By all my hope of sins forgiven,
Such looks are not of earth nor heaven!"

To Love the softest hearts are prone,
But such can ne'er be all his own;
Too timid in his woes to share,
Too meek to meet, or brave despair;
And sterner hearts alone may feel920
The wound that Time can never heal.
The rugged metal of the mine
Must burn before its surface shine,[dz][112]
But plunged within the furnace-flame,
It bends and melts—though still the same;
Then tempered to thy want, or will,
'Twill serve thee to defend or kill—
A breast-plate for thine hour of need,
Or blade to bid thy foeman bleed;
But if a dagger's form it bear,930
Let those who shape its edge, beware!
Thus Passion's fire, and Woman's art,
[129] Can turn and tame the sterner heart;
From these its form and tone are ta'en,
And what they make it, must remain,
But break—before it bend again.

If solitude succeed to grief,
Release from pain is slight relief;
The vacant bosom's wilderness
Might thank the pang that made it less.[113]940
We loathe what none are left to share:
Even bliss—'twere woe alone to bear;
The heart once left thus desolate
Must fly at last for ease—to hate.
It is as if the dead could feel [114]
The icy worm around them steal,
And shudder, as the reptiles creep
To revel o'er their rotting sleep,
Without the power to scare away
[130]The cold consumers of their clay!950
It is as if the desert bird,[115]
Whose beak unlocks her bosom's stream
To still her famished nestlings' scream,
Nor mourns a life to them transferred,
Should rend her rash devoted breast,
And find them flown her empty nest.
The keenest pangs the wretched find
Are rapture to the dreary void,
The leafless desert of the mind,
The waste of feelings unemployed.960
Who would be doomed to gaze upon
A sky without a cloud or sun?
Less hideous far the tempest's roar,
Than ne'er to brave the billows more—[ea]
Thrown, when the war of winds is o'er,
A lonely wreck on Fortune's shore,
'Mid sullen calm, and silent bay,
Unseen to drop by dull decay;—
Better to sink beneath the shock
Than moulder piecemeal on the rock!970

"Father! thy, days have passed in peace,
'Mid counted beads, and countless prayer;
To bid the sins of others cease,
Thyself without a crime or care,
Save transient ills that all must bear,
Has been thy lot from youth to age;
[131] And thou wilt bless thee from the rage
Of passions fierce and uncontrolled,
Such as thy penitents unfold,
Whose secret sins and sorrows rest980
Within thy pure and pitying breast.
My days, though few, have passed below
In much of Joy, but more of Woe;
Yet still in hours of love or strife,
I've 'scaped the weariness of Life:
Now leagued with friends, now girt by foes,
I loathed the languor of repose.
Now nothing left to love or hate,
No more with hope or pride elate,
I'd rather be the thing that crawls990
Most noxious o'er a dungeon's walls,[116]
Than pass my dull, unvarying days,
Condemned to meditate and gaze.
Yet, lurks a wish within my breast
For rest—but not to feel 'tis rest.
Soon shall my Fate that wish fulfil;
And I shall sleep without the dream
Of what I was, and would be still
Dark as to thee my deeds may seem:[eb]
My memory now is but the tomb1000
Of joys long dead; my hope, their doom:
'Though better to have died with those
Than bear a life of lingering woes.
My spirit shrunk not to sustain
The searching throes of ceaseless pain;
[132] Nor sought the self-accorded grave
Of ancient fool and modern knave:
Yet death I have not feared to meet;
And in the field it had been sweet,
Had Danger wooed me on to move1010
The slave of Glory, not of Love.
I've braved it—not for Honour's boast;
I smile at laurels won or lost;
To such let others carve their way,
For high renown, or hireling pay:
But place again before my eyes
Aught that I deem a worthy prize—
The maid I love, the man I hate—
And I will hunt the steps of fate,
To save or slay, as these require,1020
Through rending steel, and rolling fire:[ec]
Nor needst thou doubt this speech from one
Who would but do—what he hath done.
Death is but what the haughty brave,
The weak must bear, the wretch must crave;
Then let life go to Him who gave:
I have not quailed to Danger's brow
When high and happy—need I now?

"I loved her, Friar! nay, adored—
But these are words that all can use—1030
I proved it more in deed than word;
There's blood upon that dinted sword,
A stain its steel can never lose:
'Twas shed for her, who died for me,
[133] It warmed the heart of one abhorred:
Nay, start not—no—nor bend thy knee,
Nor midst my sin such act record;
Thou wilt absolve me from the deed,
For he was hostile to thy creed!
The very name of Nazarene1040
Was wormwood to his Paynim spleen.
Ungrateful fool! since but for brands
Well wielded in some hardy hands,
And wounds by Galileans given—
The surest pass to Turkish heaven—
For him his Houris still might wait
Impatient at the Prophet's gate.
I loved her—Love will find its way
Through paths where wolves would fear to prey;
And if it dares enough,'twere hard1050
If Passion met not some reward—
No matter how, or where, or why,
I did not vainly seek, nor sigh:
Yet sometimes, with remorse, in vain
I wish she had not loved again.
She died—I dare not tell thee how;
But look—'tis written on my brow!
There read of Cain the curse and crime,
In characters unworn by Time:
Still, ere thou dost condemn me, pause;1060
Not mine the act, though I the cause.
Yet did he but what I had done
Had she been false to more than one.
Faithless to him—he gave the blow;
But true to me—I laid him low:
Howe'er deserved her doom might be,
Her treachery was truth to me;
To me she gave her heart, that all
[134] Which Tyranny can ne'er enthrall;
And I, alas! too late to save!1070
Yet all I then could give, I gave—
'Twas some relief—our foe a grave.[ed]
His death sits lightly; but her fate
Has made me—what thou well mayst hate.
His doom was sealed—he knew it well,
Warned by the voice of stern Taheer,
Deep in whose darkly boding ear [117]
[135]The deathshot pealed of murder near,
As filed the troop to where they fell!
He died too in the battle broil,1080
A time that heeds nor pain nor toil;
One cry to Mahomet for aid,
One prayer to Alla all he made:
He knew and crossed me in the fray—
I gazed upon him where he lay,
And watched his spirit ebb away:
Though pierced like pard by hunter's steel,
He felt not half that now I feel.
I searched, but vainly searched, to find
The workings of a wounded mind;1090
Each feature of that sullen corse
Betrayed his rage, but no remorse.[118]
Oh, what had Vengeance given to trace
Despair upon his dying face!
The late repentance of that hour
When Penitence hath lost her power
To tear one terror from the grave,[ee]
And will not soothe, and cannot save.

[136]

"The cold in clime are cold in blood,
Their love can scarce deserve the name;1100
But mine was like the lava flood
That boils in Ætna's breast of flame.
I cannot prate in puling strain
Of Ladye-love, and Beauty's chain:
If changing cheek, and scorching vein,[ef]
Lips taught to writhe, but not complain,
If bursting heart, and maddening brain,
And daring deed, and vengeful steel,
And all that I have felt, and feel,
Betoken love—that love was mine,1110
And shown by many a bitter sign.
'Tis true, I could not whine nor sigh,
I knew but to obtain or die.
I die—but first I have possessed,
And come what may, I have been blessed.
Shall I the doom I sought upbraid?
No—reft of all, yet undismayed [eg]
But for the thought of Leila slain,
Give me the pleasure with the pain,
So would I live and love again.1120
I grieve, but not, my holy Guide!
For him who dies, but her who died:
She sleeps beneath the wandering wave—
Ah! had she but an earthly grave,
This breaking heart and throbbing head
Should seek and share her narrow bed.
She was a form of Life and Light,[119]
[137]That, seen, became a part of sight;
And rose, where'er I turned mine eye,
The Morning-star of Memory!1130

"Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;[eh][120]
A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Alia given,
To lift from earth our low desire.
Devotion wafts the mind above,
But Heaven itself descends in Love;
A feeling from the Godhead caught,
To wean from self each sordid thought;
A ray of Him who formed the whole;
[138]A Glory circling round the soul!1140
I grant my love imperfect, all
That mortals by the name miscall;
Then deem it evil, what thou wilt;
But say, oh say, hers was not Guilt!
She was my Life's unerring Light:
That quenched—what beam shall break my night?[ei]
Oh! would it shone to lead me still,
Although to death or deadliest ill!
Why marvel ye, if they who lose
This present joy, this future hope,1150
No more with Sorrow meekly cope;
In phrensy then their fate accuse;
In madness do those fearful deeds
That seem to add but Guilt to Woe?
Alas! the breast that inly bleeds
Hath nought to dread from outward blow:
Who falls from all he knows of bliss,
Cares little into what abyss.[ej]
Fierce as the gloomy vulture's now
To thee, old man, my deeds appear:1160
I read abhorrence on thy brow,
And this too was I born to bear!
'Tis true, that, like that bird of prey,
With havock have I marked my way:
But this was taught me by the dove,
To die—and know no second love.
This lesson yet hath man to learn,
Taught by the thing he dares to spurn:
The bird that sings within the brake,
The swan that swims upon the lake,1170
One mate, and one alone, will take.
[139] And let the fool still prone to range,[ek]
And sneer on all who cannot change,
Partake his jest with boasting boys;
I envy not his varied joys,
But deem such feeble, heartless man,
Less than yon solitary swan;
Far, far beneath the shallow maid [el]
He left believing and betrayed.
Such shame at least was never mine—1180
Leila! each thought was only thine!
My good, my guilt, my weal, my woe,
My hope on high—my all below.
Each holds no other like to thee,
Or, if it doth, in vain for me:
For worlds I dare not view the dame
Resembling thee, yet not the same.
The very crimes that mar my youth,
This bed of death—attest my truth!
'Tis all too late—thou wert, thou art1190
The cherished madness of my heart![em]

"And she was lost—and yet I breathed,
But not the breath of human life:
A serpent round my heart was wreathed,
And stung my every thought to strife.
Alike all time, abhorred all place,[en]
Shuddering I shrank from Nature's face,
[140] Where every hue that charmed before
The blackness of my bosom wore.
The rest thou dost already know,1200
And all my sins, and half my woe.
But talk no more of penitence;
Thou seest I soon shall part from hence:
And if thy holy tale were true,
The deed that's done canst thou undo?
Think me not thankless—but this grief
Looks not to priesthood for relief.[eo][121]
My soul's estate in secret guess:
But wouldst thou pity more, say less.
When thou canst bid my Leila live,1210
Then will I sue thee to forgive;
Then plead my cause in that high place
Where purchased masses proffer grace.[ep]
Go, when the hunter's hand hath wrung
From forest-cave her shrieking young,
And calm the lonely lioness:
But soothe not—mock not my distress!

"In earlier days, and calmer hours,
When heart with heart delights to blend,
Where bloom my native valley's bowers,[eq]1220
I had—Ah! have I now?—a friend![er]
[141]To him this pledge I charge thee send,[es]
Memorial of a youthful vow;
I would remind him of my end:
Though souls absorbed like mine allow
Brief thought to distant Friendship's claim,
Yet dear to him my blighted name.
'Tis strange—he prophesied my doom,
And I have smiled—I then could smile—
When Prudence would his voice assume,1230
And warn—I recked not what—the while:
But now Remembrance whispers o'er [et]
Those accents scarcely marked before.
Say—that his bodings came to pass,
And he will start to hear their truth,
And wish his words had not been sooth:
Tell him—unheeding as I was,
Through many a busy bitter scene
Of all our golden youth had been,
In pain, my faltering tongue had tried1240
To bless his memory—ere I died;
[142] But Heaven in wrath would turn away,
If Guilt should for the guiltless pray.
I do not ask him not to blame,
Too gentle he to wound my name;
And what have I to do with Fame?
I do not ask him not to mourn,
Such cold request might sound like scorn;
And what than Friendship's manly tear
May better grace a brother's bier?1250
But bear this ring, his own of old,
And tell him—what thou dost behold!
The withered frame, the ruined mind,
The wrack by passion left behind,
A shrivelled scroll, a scattered leaf,
Seared by the autumn blast of Grief!

"Tell me no more of Fancy's gleam,
No, father, no,'twas not a dream;
Alas! the dreamer first must sleep,
I only watched, and wished to weep;1260
But could not, for my burning brow
Throbbed to the very brain as now:
I wished but for a single tear,
As something welcome, new, and dear:
I wished it then, I wish it still;
Despair is stronger than my will.
Waste not thine orison, despair [eu]
Is mightier than thy pious prayer:
I would not, if I might, be blest;
I want no Paradise, but rest.1270
'Twas then—I tell thee—father! then
I saw her; yes, she lived again;
[143] And shining in her white symar [122]
As through yon pale gray cloud the star
Which now I gaze on, as on her,
Who looked and looks far lovelier;
Dimly I view its trembling spark;[ev]
To-morrow's night shall be more dark;
And I, before its rays appear,
That lifeless thing the living fear.1280
I wander—father! for my soul
Is fleeting towards the final goal.
I saw her—friar! and I rose
Forgetful of our former woes;
And rushing from my couch, I dart,
And clasp her to my desperate heart;
I clasp—what is it that I clasp?
No breathing form within my grasp,
No heart that beats reply to mine—
Yet, Leila! yet the form is thine!1290
And art thou, dearest, changed so much
As meet my eye, yet mock my touch?
Ah! were thy beauties e'er so cold,
I care not—so my arms enfold
The all they ever wished to hold.
Alas! around a shadow prest
They shrink upon my lonely breast;
Yet still 'tis there! In silence stands,
And beckons with beseeching hands!
With braided hair, and bright-black eye—1300
I knew 'twas false—she could not die!
[144] But he is dead! within the dell
I saw him buried where he fell;
He comes not—for he cannot break
From earth;—why then art thou awake?
They told me wild waves rolled above
The face I view—the form I love;
They told me—'twas a hideous tale!—
I'd tell it, but my tongue would fail:
If true, and from thine ocean-cave1310
Thou com'st to claim a calmer grave,
Oh! pass thy dewy fingers o'er
This brow that then will burn no more;
Or place them on my hopeless heart:
But, Shape or Shade! whate'er thou art,
In mercy ne'er again depart!
Or farther with thee bear my soul
Than winds can waft or waters roll!

"Such is my name, and such my tale.
Confessor! to thy secret ear1320
I breathe the sorrows I bewail,
And thank thee for the generous tear
This glazing eye could never shed.
Then lay me with the humblest dead,[ew]
And, save the cross above my head,
Be neither name nor emblem spread,
By prying stranger to be read,
Or stay the passing pilgrim's tread."[123]
[145]

He passed—nor of his name and race
[146]He left a token or a trace,1330
Save what the Father must not say
Who shrived him on his dying day:
This broken tale was all we knew [ex]
Of her he loved, or him he slew.

FOOTNOTES:

[55] {85} A tomb above the rocks on the promontory, by some supposed the sepulchre of Themistocles.

["There are," says Cumberland, in his Observer, "a few lines by Plato upon the tomb of Themistocles, which have a turn of elegant and pathetic simplicity in them, that deserves a better translation than I can give—

"'By the sea's margin, on the watery strand,
Thy monument, Themistocles, shall stand:
By this directed to thy native shore,
The merchant shall convey his freighted store;
And when our fleets are summoned to the fight
Athens shall conquer with thy tomb in sight.'"

Note to Edition 1832.

The traditional site of the tomb of Themistocles, "a rock-hewn grave on the very margin of the sea generally covered with water," adjoins the lighthouse, which stands on the westernmost promontory of the Piræus, some three quarters of a mile from the entrance to the harbour. Plutarch, in his Themistocles (cap. xxxii.), is at pains to describe the exact site of the "altar-like tomb," and quotes the passage from Plato (the comic poet, B.C. 428-389) which Cumberland paraphrases. Byron and Hobhouse "made the complete circuit of the peninsula of Munychia," January 18, 1810.—Travels in Albania, 1858, i. 317, 318.]

[cg] {86}

Fair clime! where ceaseless summer smiles
Benignant o'er those blessed isles,
Which seen from far Colonna's height,
Make glad the heart that hails the sight,
And lend to loneliness delight.
There shine the bright abodes ye seek,
Like dimples upon Occan's cheek,
So smiling round the waters lave
These Edens of the Eastern wave.
Or if, at times, the transient breeze
Break the smooth crystal of the seas,
Or brush one blossom from the trees,
How grateful is each gentle air
That wakes and wafts the fragrance there.—[MS.]
——the fragrance there.—[Second Edition.]

[56] The attachment of the nightingale to the rose is a well-known Persian fable. If I mistake not, the "Bulbul of a thousand tales" is one of his appellations.

[Thus Mesihi, as translated by Sir William Jones—

"Come, charming maid! and hear thy poet sing,
Thyself the rose and he the bird of spring:
Love bids him sing, and Love will be obey'd.
Be gay: too soon the flowers of spring will fade."

"The full style and title of the Persian nightingale (Pycnonotus hæmorrhous) is 'Bulbul-i-hazár-dástán,' usually shortened to 'Hazar' (bird of a thousand tales = the thousand), generally called 'Andalib.'" (See Arabian Nights, by Richard F. Burton, 1887; Supplemental Nights, iii. 506.) For the nightingale's attachment to the rose, compare Moore's Lalla Rookh—

"Oh! sooner shall the rose of May
Mistake her own sweet nightingale," etc.

(Ed. "Chandos Classics," p. 423)

and Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (stanza vi.)—

"And David's lips are lockt; but in divine
High piping Pehlevi, with 'Wine! Wine! Wine!
Red Wine!'—the Nightingale cries to the Rose
That sallow cheek of hers to incarnadine."

Rubáiyát, etc., 1899, p. 29, and note, p. 62.

Byron was indebted for his information to a note on a passage in Vathek, by S. Henley (Vathek, 1893, p. 217).]

[57] {87} The guitar is the constant amusement of the Greek sailor by night; with a steady fair wind, and during a calm, it is accompanied always by the voice, and often by dancing.

[ch] {88} Should wanton in a wilderness.—[MS.]

[ci] The first draft of this celebrated passage differs in many particulars from the Fair Copy, which, with the exception of the passages marked as vars. i. (p. 89) and i. (p. 90), is the same as the text. It ran as follows:—

He who hath bent him o'er the dead
Ere the first day of death is fled—
The first dark day of Nothingness
The last of doom and of distress—
Before Corruption's cankering fingers
Hath tinged the hue where Beauty lingers
And marked the soft and settled air
That dwells with all but Spirit there
The fixed yet tender lines that speak
Of Peace along the placid cheek
And—but for that sad shrouded eye
That fires not—pleads not—weeps not—now—
And but for that pale chilling brow
Whose touch tells of Mortality
And curdles to the Gazer's heart
As if to him it could impart
The doom he only looks upon—
Yes but for these and these alone,
A moment—yet—a little hour
We still might doubt the Tyrant's power.

The eleven lines following (88-98) were not emended in the Fair Copy, and are included in the text. The Fair Copy is the sole MS. authority for the four concluding lines of the paragraph.

[58] [Compare "Beyond Milan the country wore the aspect of a wider devastation; and though everything seemed more quiet, the repose was like that of death spread over features which retain the impression of the last convulsions."—Mysteries of Udolpho, by Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, 1794, ii. 29.]

[cj] {89}

And marked the almost dreaming air,
Which speaks the sweet repose that's there.—

[MS. of Fair Copy.]

[59] {90}

"Aye, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction?"

Measure for Measure, act iii. sc. I, lines 115, 116.

[Compare, too, Childe Harold, Canto II. stanza iv. line 5.]

[ck]

Whose touch thrills with mortality,
And curdles to the gazer's heart.—[MS. of Fair Copy.]

[60] I trust that few of my readers have ever had an opportunity of witnessing what is here attempted in description; but those who have will probably retain a painful remembrance of that singular beauty which pervades, with few exceptions, the features of the dead, a few hours, and but for a few hours, after "the spirit is not there." It is to be remarked in cases of violent death by gun-shot wounds, the expression is always that of languor, whatever the natural energy of the sufferer's character; but in death from a stab the countenance preserves its traits of feeling or ferocity, and the mind its bias, to the last. [According to Medwin (1824, 4to, p. 223), an absurd charge, based on the details of this note, was brought against Byron, that he had been guilty of murder, and spoke from experience.]

[61] [In Dallaway's Constantinople (p. 2) [Rev. James Dallaway (1763-1834) published Constantinople Ancient and Modern, etc., in 1797], a book which Lord Byron is not unlikely to have consulted, I find a passage quoted from Gillies' History of Greece(vol. i. p. 335), which contains, perhaps, the first seed of the thought thus expanded into full perfection by genius: "The present state of Greece, compared to the ancient, is the silent obscurity of the grave contrasted with the vivid lustre of active life."—Moore, Note to Edition 1832.]

[62] {91} [From hence to the conclusion of the paragraph, the MS. is written in a hurried and almost illegible hand, as if these splendid lines had been poured forth in one continuous burst of poetic feeling, which would hardly allow time for the pen to follow the imagination.—(Note to Edition 1837. The lines were added to the Second Edition.)]

[cl] Fountain of Wisdom! can it be.—[MS. erased.]

[63] [Compare—"Son of the Morning, rise! approach you here!" Childe Harold, Canto II. stanza iii. line 1.]

[cm]

Why is not this Thermopylæ;
These waters blue that round you lave
Degenerate offspring of the free—
How name ye them what shore is this?
The wave, the rock of Salamis?—[MS.]

[cn] {92}

And he who in the cause expires,
Will add a name and fate to them
Well worthy of his noble stem.—[MS.]

[co] Commenced by Sire—renewed by Son.—[MS.]

[cp]

Attest it many a former age
While kings in dark oblivion hid.—[MS.]

[cq] There let the Muse direct thine eye.—[MS.]

[cr] {93} The hearts amid thy mountains bred.—[MS.]

[64] Athens is the property of the Kislar Aga [kizlar-aghasî] (the slave of the Seraglio and guardian of the women), who appoints the Waywode. A pander and eunuch—these are not polite, yet true appellations—now governs the governor of Athens!

[Hobhouse maintains that this subordination of the waiwodes (or vaivodes = the Sclavic βοεβόδα (Turkish governors of Athens) to a higher Turkish official, was on the whole favourable to the liberties and well-being of the Athenians.—Travels in Albania, 1858, i. 246.]

[cs]

Now to the neighbouring shores they waft
Their ancient and proverbial craft.—[MS. erased.]

[ct] {94} he silent slants the doubtful creek.—[MS]

[65] [The reciter of the tale is a Turkish fisherman, who has been employed during the day in the gulf of Ægina, and in the evening, apprehensive of the Mainote pirates who infest the coast of Attica, lands with his boat on the harbour of Port Leone, the ancient Piræus. He becomes the eye-witness of nearly all the incidents in the story, and in one of them is a principal agent. It is to his feelings, and particularly to his religious prejudices, that we are indebted for some of the most forcible and splendid parts of the poem.—Note by George Agar Ellis, 1797-1833.]

[66] [In Dr. Clarke's Travels (Edward Daniel Clarke, 1769-1822, published Travels in Europe, Asia, Africa, 1810-24), this word, which means infidel, is always written according to its English pronunciation, Djour. Byron adopted the Italian spelling usual among the Franks of the Levant.—Note to Edition 1832.

The pronunciation of the word depends on its origin. If it is associated with the Arabic jawr, a "deviating" or "erring," the initial consonant would be soft, but if with the Persian gawr, or guebre, "a fire-worshipper," the word should be pronounced Gow-er—as Gower Street has come to be pronounced. It is to be remarked that to the present day the Nestorians of Urumiah are contemned as Gy-ours (the G hard), by their Mohammedan countrymen.—(From information kindly supplied by Mr. A. G. Ellis, of the Oriental Printed Books and MSS. Department, British Museum.)]

[cu] {95} Though scarcely marked——.—[MS.]

[cv]

With him my wonder as he flew.—[MS.]
With him my roused and wondering view.—[MS. erased.]

[cw] {96} For him who takes so fast a flight.—[MS. erased.]

[67] [Compare—

"A moment now he slacked his speed,
A moment breathed his panting steed."

Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto I. stanza xxvii. lines 1, 2.]

[cx] And looked along the olive wood.—[MS.]

[68] "Tophaike," musket. The Bairam is announced by the cannon at sunset: the illumination of the mosques, and the firing of all kinds of small arms, loaded with ball, proclaim it during the night. [The Bairâm, the Moslem Easter, a festival of three days, succeeded the Ramazân.]

For the illumination of the mosques during the fast of the Ramazân, see Childe Harold, Canto II. stanza lv. line 5, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 134, note 2.

[cy] {97} Of transient Anger's Darkening blush.—[MS.]

[69] [For "hasty," all the editions till the twelfth read "darkening blush." On the back of a copy of the eleventh, Lord Byron has written, "Why did not the printer attend to the solitary correction so repeatedly made? I have no copy of this, and desire to have none till my request is complied with." Notes to Editions 1832, 1837.]

[cz]

As doubting if to stay or fly—
Then turned it swiftly to his blade;
As loud his raven charger neighed—
That sound dispelled his waking dream,
As sleepers start at owlet's scream.—[MS.]

[70] Jerreed, or Djerrid [Jarid], a blunted Turkish javelin, which is darted from horseback with great force and precision. It is a favourite exercise of the Mussulmans; but I know not if it can be called a manly one, since the most expert in the art are the Black Eunuchs of Constantinople. I think, next to these, a Mamlouk at Smyrna was the most skilful that came within my observation. [Lines 250, 251, together with the note, were inserted in the Third Edition.]

[da] {98}

'Twas but an instant, though so long
When thus dilated in my song.
'Twas but an instant——.—[MS.]

[db]

Such moment holds a thousand years.
or, Such moment proves the grief of years.—[MS.]

[71] ["Lord Byron told Mr. Murray that he took this idea from one of the Arabian tales—that in which the Sultan puts his head into a butt of water, and, though it remains there for only two or three minutes, he imagines that he lives many years during that time. The story had been quoted by Addison in the Spectator" [No. 94, June 18, 1711].—Memoir of John Murray, 1891, i. 219, note.]

[72] [Lines 271-276 were added in the Third Edition. The MS. proceeds with a direction (dated July 31, 1813) to the printer—"And alter

'A life of woe—an age of crime—'

'A life of pain—an age of crime.'

Alter also the lines

'On him who loves or hates or fears
Such moment holds a thousand years,'

'O'er him who loves or hates or fears
Such moment pours the grief of years.'"]

[dc] {99} But neither fled nor fell alone.—[MS.]

[73] The blast of the desert, fatal to everything living, and often alluded to in Eastern poetry.

[James Bruce, 1730-1794 (nicknamed "Abyssinian Bruce"), gives a remarkable description of the simoom: "I saw from the south-east a haze come, in colour like the purple part of the rainbow, but not so compressed or thick. It did not occupy twenty yards in breadth, and was about twelve feet high from the ground. It was a kind of blush upon the air, and it moved very rapidly.... We all lay flat on the ground ... till it was blown over. The meteor, or purple haze, which I saw was, indeed, passed, but the light air which still blew was of a heat to threaten suffocation." He goes on to say that he did not recover the effect of the sandblast on his chest for nearly two years (Brace's Life and Travels, ed. 1830, p. 470).—Note to Edition 1832.]

[dd] There are two MS. versions of lines 290-298: (A) a rough copy, and (B) a fair copy—

(A) And wide the Spider's thin grey pall
Is curtained on the splendid wall—
The Bat hath built in his mother's bower,
And in the fortress of his power
The Owl hath fixed her beacon tower,
The wild dogs howl on the fountain's brim
With baffled thirst and famine grim,
For the stream is shrunk from its marble bed
Where Desolation's dust is spread.—[MS.]

B. ["August 5, 1813, in last of 3rd or first of 4th ed."]
The lonely Spider's thin grey pall
Is curtained o'er the splendid wall—
The Bat builds in his mother's bower;
And in the fortress of his power
The Owl hath fixed her beacon-tower,
The wild dog howls o'er the fountain's brink,
But vainly lolls his tongue to drink.—[MS.]

[74] {100} [Compare "The walls of Balclutha were desolated.... The stream of Clutha was removed from its place by the fall of the walls. The fox looked out from the windows" (Ossian's Balclutha). "The dreary night-owl screams in the solitary retreat of his mouldering ivy-covered tower" (Larnul, or the Song of Despair: Poems of Ossian, discovered by the Baron de Harold, 1787, p. 172). Compare, too, the well-known lines, "The spider holds the veil in the palace of Cæsar; the owl stands sentinel on the watch-tower of Afrasyab" (A Grammar of the Persian Language, by Sir W. Jones, 1809, p. 106).]

[de]

The silver dew of coldness sprinkling
In drops fantastically twinkling
As from the spring the silver dew
In whirls fantastically flew
And dashed luxurions coolness round
The air—and verdure on the ground.—[MS.]

[df] {101}

For thirsty Fox and Jackal gaunt
May vainly for its waters pant.—[MS.]
or, The famished fox the wild dog gaunt
May vainly for its waters pant.—[MS.]

[dg] Might strike an echo——.—[MS.]

[dh] {102}

And welcome Life though but in one
For many a gilded chamber's there
Unmeet for Solitude to share.—- [MS.]

[75] ["I have just recollected an alteration you may make in the proof.... Among the lines on Hassan's Serai, is this—'Unmeet for Solitude to share.' Now, to share implies more than one, and Solitude is a single gentlewoman: it must be thus—

'For many a gilded chamber's there,
Which Solitude might well forbear;'

and so on. Will you adopt this correction? and pray accept a cheese from me for your trouble."—Letter to John Murray, Stilton, October 3, 1813, Letters, 1898, ii. 274.]

[di] To share the Master's "bread and salt."—[MS.]

[76] [To partake of food—to break bread and taste salt with your host, ensures the safety of the guest: even though an enemy, his person from that moment becomes sacred.—(Note appended to Letter of October 3, 1813.)

"I leave this (vide supra, note 1) to your discretion; if anybody thinks the old line a good one or the cheese a bad one, don't accept either. But in that case the word share is repeated soon after in the line—

'To share the master's bread and salt;'

and must be altered to—

'To break the master's bread and salt.'

This is not so well, though—confound it!

If the old line ['Unmeet for Solitude to share'] stands, let the other run thus—

'Nor there will weary traveller halt,
To bless the sacred bread and salt.'"

(P.S. to Murray, October 3, 1813.)

The emendation of line 335 made that of line 343 unnecessary, but both emendations were accepted.

(Moore says (Life; p. 191, note) that the directions are written on a separate slip of paper from the letter to Murray of October 3, 1813).]

[dj] {103}

And cold Hospitality shrinks from the labour,
The slave fled his halter and the serf left his labour.—[MS.]
or, Ah! there Hospitality light is thy labour,
or, Ah! who for the traveller's solace will labour?—[MS.]

[77] I need hardly observe, that Charity and Hospitality are the first duties enjoined by Mahomet; and to say truth, very generally practised by his disciples. The first praise that can be bestowed on a chief is a panegyric on his bounty; the next, on his valour. ["Serve God ... and show kindness unto parents, and relations, and orphans, and the poor, and your neighbour who is of kin to you ... and the traveller, and the captives," etc.—Korân, cap. iv. Lines 350, 351 were inserted in the Fifth Edition.]

[78] The ataghan, a long dagger worn with pistols in the belt, in a metal scabbard, generally of silver; and, among the wealthier, gilt, or of gold.

[79] Green is the privileged colour of the prophet's numerous pretended descendants; with them, as here, faith (the family inheritance) is supposed to supersede the necessity of good works: they are the worst of a very indifferent brood.

[80] {104} "Salam aleikoum! aleikoum salam!" peace be with you; be with you peace—the salutation reserved for the faithful:—to a Christian, "Urlarula!" a good journey; or "saban hiresem, saban serula," good morn, good even; and sometimes, "may your end be happy!" are the usual salutes.

["After both sets of prayers, Farz and Sunnah, the Moslem looks over his right shoulder, and says, 'The Peace (of Allah) be upon you and the ruth of Allah,' and repeats the words over the left shoulder. The salutation is addressed to the Guardian Angels, or to the bystanders (Moslem), who, however, do not return it."—Arabian Nights, by Richard F. Burton, 1887: Supplemental Nights, i. 14, note.]

[dk]

Take ye and give ye that salam,
That says of Moslem faith I am.—[MS.]

[dl] Which one of yonder barks may wait.—[MS.]

[81] [In the MS. and the first five editions the broken line (373) consisted of two words only, "That one."]

[82] The blue-winged butterfly of Kashmeer, the most rare and beautiful of the species.

[The same insects (butterflies of Cachemir) are celebrated in an unpublished poem of Mesihi.... Sir Anthony Shirley relates that it was customary in Persia "to hawk after butterflies with sparrows, made to that use."—Note by S. Henley to Vathek, ed. 1893, p. 222. Byron, in his Journal, December 1, 1813, speaks of Lady Charlemont as "that blue-winged Kashmirian butterfly of book-learning."]

[dm] If caught, to fate alike betrayed.-[MS.]

[dn] {106} The gathering flames around her close.-[MS. erased.]

[83] {107} Alluding to the dubious suicide of the scorpion, so placed for experiment by gentle philosophers. Some maintain that the position of the sting, when turned towards the head, is merely a convulsive movement; but others have actually brought in the verdict "Felo de se." The scorpions are surely interested in a speedy decision of the question; as, if once fairly established as insect Catos, they will probably be allowed to live as long as they think proper, without being martyred for the sake of an hypothesis.

[Byron assured Dallas that the simile of the scorpion was imagined in his sleep.—Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron, by R. C. Dallas, p. 264.

"Probably in some instances the poor scorpion has been burnt to death; and the well-known habit of these creatures to raise the tail over the back and recurve it so that the extremity touches the fore part of the cephalo-thorax, has led to the idea that it was stinging itself."—Encycl. Brit., art. "Arachnida," by Rev. O. P. Cambridge, ii. 281.]

[do] So writhes the mind by Conscience riven.—[MS.]

[84] The cannon at sunset close the Rhamazan. [Compare Childe Harold, Canto II. stanza Iv. line 5, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 134. note 2.]

[85] {108} Phingari, the moon. φεγγάρι is derived from φεγγάριον, dim. of φέγγος.

[86] The celebrated fabulous ruby of Sultan Giamschid, the embellisher of Istakhar; from its splendour, named Schebgerag [Schabchirāgh], "the torch of night;" also "the cup of the sun," etc. In the First Edition, "Giamschid" was written as a word of three syllables; so D'Herbelot has it; but I am told Richardson reduces it to a dissyllable, and writes "Jamshid." I have left in the text the orthography of the one with the pronunciation of the other.

[The MS. and First Edition read, "Bright as the gem of Giamschid." Byron's first intention was to change the line into "Bright as the ruby of Giamschid;" but to this Moore objected, "that as the comparison of his heroine's eye to a ruby might unluckily call up the idea of its being bloodshot, he had better change the line to 'Bright as the jewel,' etc."

For the original of Byron's note, see S. Henley's note, Vathek, 1893, p. 230. See, too, D'Herbelot's Bibliothèque Orientale, 1781, iii. 27.

Sir Richard Burton (Arabian Nights, S.N., iii. 440) gives the following résumé of the conflicting legends: "Jám-i-jámshid is a well-known commonplace in Moslem folk-lore; but commentators cannot agree whether 'Jám' be a mirror or a cup. In the latter sense it would represent the Cyathomantic cup of the Patriarch Joseph, and the symbolic bowl of Nestor. Jamshid may be translated either 'Jam the bright,' or 'the Cup of the Sun;' this ancient king is the Solomon of the grand old Guebres."

Fitzgerald, "in a very composite quatrain (stanza v.) which cannot be claimed as a translation at all" (see the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyaām, by Edward Heron Allen, 1898), embodies a late version of the myth—

"Iram is gone and all his Rose,
And Jamshyd's sev'n-ringed Cup where no one knows."]

[87] {109} Al-Sirat, the bridge of breadth narrower than the thread of a famished spider, and sharper than the edge of a sword, over which the Mussulmans must skate into Paradise, to which it is the only entrance; but this is not the worst, the river beneath being hell itself, into which, as may be expected, the unskilful and tender of foot contrive to tumble with a "facilis descensus Averni," not very pleasing in prospect to the next passenger. There is a shorter cut downwards for the Jews and Christians.

[Byron is again indebted to Vathek, and S. Henley on Vathek, p. 237, for his information. The authority for the legend of the Bridge of Paradise is not the Koran, but the Book of Mawakef, quoted by Edward Pococke, in his Commentary (Notæ Miscellaneæ) on the Porta Mosis of Moses Maimonides (Oxford, 1654, p. 288)—

"Stretched across the back of Hell, it is narrower than a javelin, sharper than the edge of a sword. But all must essay the passage, believers as well as infidels, and it baffles the understanding to imagine in what manner they keep their foothold."

The legend, or rather allegory, to which there would seem to be some allusion in the words of Scripture, "Strait is the gate," etc., is of Zoroastrian origin. Compare the Zend-Avesta, Yasna xix. 6 (Sacred Books of the East, edited by F. Max Muller, 1887, xxxi. 261), "With even threefold (safety and with speed) I will bring his soul over the Bridge of Kinvat," etc.]

[88] {110} A vulgar error: the Koran allots at least a third of Paradise to well-behaved women; but by far the greater number of Mussulmans interpret the text their own way, and exclude their moieties from heaven. Being enemies to Platonics, they cannot discern "any fitness of things" in the souls of the other sex, conceiving them to be superseded by the Houris.

[Sale, in his Preliminary Discourse ("Chandos Classics," p. 80), in dealing with this question, notes "that there are several passages in the Koran which affirm that women, in the next life, will not only be punished for their evil actions, but will also receive the rewards of their good deeds, as well as the men, and that in this case God will make no distinction of sexes." A single quotation will suffice: "God has promised to believers, men and women, gardens beneath which rivers flow, to dwell therein for aye; and goodly places in the garden of Eden."—The Qur'ân, translated by E. H. Palmer, 1880, vi. 183.]

[89] An Oriental simile, which may, perhaps, though fairly stolen, be deemed "plus Arabe qu'en Arabie."

[Gulnár (the heroine of the Corsair is named Gulnare) is Persian for a pomegranate flower.]

[90] Hyacinthine, in Arabic "Sunbul;" as common a thought in the Eastern poets as it was among the Greeks.

[S. Henley (Vathek, 1893, p. 208) quotes two lines from the Solima (lines 5, 6) of Sir W. Jones—

"The fragrant hyacinths of Azza's hair
That wanton with the laughing summer-air;"

and refers Milton's "Hyacinthine locks" (Paradise Lost, iv. 301) to Lucian's Pro Imaginibus, cap. v.]

[91] {111} "Franguestan," Circassia. [Or Europe generally—the land of the Frank.]

[92] [Lines 504-518 were inserted in the second revise of the Third Edition, July 31, 1813.]

[93] {113} [Parnassus.]

[94] "In the name of God;" the commencement of all the chapters of the Koran but one [the ninth], and of prayer and thanksgiving. ["Bismillah" (in full, Bismillahi 'rrahmani 'rrahiem, i.e. "In the name of Allah the God of Mercy, the Merciful") is often used as a deprecatory formula. Sir R. Burton (Arabian Nights, i. 40) cites as an equivalent the "remembering Iddio e' Santí," of Boccaccio's Decameron, viii. 9.

The MS. reads, "Thank Alla! now the peril's past."]

[95] [A Turkish messenger, sergeant or lictor. The proper sixteen-seventeenth century pronunciation would have been chaush, but apparently the nearest approach to this was chaus, whence chouse and chiaush, and the vulgar form chiaus (N. Eng. Dict., art. "Chiaus"). The peculations of a certain "chiaus" in the year A.D. 1000 are said to have been the origin of the word "to chouse."]

[96] {114} A phenomenon not uncommon with an angry Mussulman. In 1809 the Capitan Pacha's whiskers at a diplomatic audience were no less lively with indignation than a tiger cat's, to the horror of all the dragomans; the portentous mustachios twisted, they stood erect of their own accord, and were expected every moment to change their colour, but at last condescended to subside, which, probably, saved more heads than they contained hairs.

[97] {115} "Amaun," quarter, pardon.

[Line 603 was inserted in a proof of the Second Edition, dated July 24, 1813: "Nor raised the coward cry, Amaun!"]

[98] The "evil eye," a common superstition in the Levant, and of which the imaginary effects are yet very singular on those who conceive themselves affected.

[99] [Compare "As with a thousand waves to the rocks, so Swaran's host came on."—Fingal, bk. i., Ossian's Works, 1807, i. 19.]

[dp] {116} That neither gives nor asks for life.—[MS.]

[100] {117} The flowered shawls generally worn by persons of rank.

[101] [Compare "Catilina vero longè a suis, inter hostium cadavera repertus est, paululum etiam spirans ferociamque animi, quam habuerat vivus, in vultu retinens."—Catilina, cap. 61, Opera, 1820, i. 124.]

[dq] {118}

His mother looked from the lattice high,
With throbbing heart and eager eye;
The browsing camel bells are tinkling,
And the last beam of twilight twinkling:
'Tis eve; his train should now be nigh.
She could not rest in her garden bower,
And gazed through the loop of her steepest tower.
"Why comes he not? his steeds are fleet,
And well are they train'd to the summer's heat."—[MS.]

Another copy began—

The browsing camel bells are tinkling,
And the first beam of evening twinkling;
His mother looked from her lattice high,
With throbbing breast and eager eye—
"'Tis twilight—sure his train is nigh."—[MS. Aug. 11, 1813.]

The browsing camel's bells are tinkling
The dews of eve the pasture sprinkling
And rising planets feebly twinkling:
His mother looked from the lattice high
With throbbing heart and eager eye.—[Fourth Edition.]

[These lines were erased, and lines 689-692 were substituted. They appeared first in the Fifth Edition.]

[102] ["The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming? why tarry the wheels of his chariot?"—Judges v. 28.]

[dr] {119} And now his courser's pace amends.—[MS. erased.]

[ds] I could not deem my son was slow.—[MS. erased.]

[dt]

The Tartar sped beneath the gate
And flung to earth his fainting weight.—[MS.]

[103] The calpac is the solid cap or centre part of the head-dress; the shawl is wound round it, and forms the turban.

[104] The turban, pillar, and inscriptive verse, decorate the tombs of the Osmanlies, whether in the cemetery or the wilderness. In the mountains you frequently pass similar mementos; and on inquiry you are informed that they record some victim of rebellion, plunder, or revenge.

[The following is a "Koran verse:" "Every one that is upon it (the earth) perisheth; but the person of thy Lord abideth, the possessor of glory and honour" (Sur. lv. 26, 27). (See "Kufic Tombstones in the British Museum," by Professor Wright, Proceedings of the Biblical Archæological Society, 1887, ix. 337, sq.)]

[105] {120} "Alla Hu!" the concluding words of the Muezzin's call to prayer from the highest gallery on the exterior of the Minaret. On a still evening, when the Muezzin has a fine voice, which is frequently the case, the effect is solemn and beautiful beyond all the bells in Christendom. [Valid, the son of Abdalmalek, was the first who erected a minaret or turret; and this he placed on the grand mosque at Damascus, for the muezzin or crier to announce from it the hour of prayer. (See D'Herbelot, Bibliothèque Orientale, 1783, vi. 473, art. "Valid." See, too, Childe Harold, Canto II. stanza lix. line 9, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 136, note 1.)]

[106] The following is part of a battle-song of the Turks:—"I see—I see a dark-eyed girl of Paradise, and she waves a handkerchief, a kerchief of green; and cries aloud, 'Come, kiss me, for I love thee,'" etc.

[107] {121} Monkir and Nekir are the inquisitors of the dead, before whom the corpse undergoes a slight noviciate and preparatory training for damnation. If the answers are none of the clearest, he is hauled up with a scythe and thumped down with a red-hot mace till properly seasoned, with a variety of subsidiary probations. The office of these angels is no sinecure; there are but two, and the number of orthodox deceased being in a small proportion to the remainder, their hands are always full.—See Relig. Ceremon., v. 290; vii. 59,68, 118, and Sale's Preliminary Discourse to the Koran, p. 101.

[Byron is again indebted to S. Henley (see Vathek, 1893, p. 236). According to Pococke (Porta Mosis, 1654, Notæ Miscellaneæ, p. 241), the angels Moncar and Nacir are black, ghastly, and of fearsome aspect. Their function is to hold inquisition on the corpse. If his replies are orthodox (de Mohammede), he is bidden to sleep sweetly and soundly in his tomb, but if his views are lax and unsound, he is cudgelled between the ears with iron rods. Loud are his groans, and audible to the whole wide world, save to those deaf animals, men and genii. Finally, the earth is enjoined to press him tight and keep him close till the crack of doom.]

[108] Eblis, the Oriental Prince of Darkness.

[109] The Vampire superstition is still general in the Levant. Honest Tournefort [Relation d'un Voyage du Levant, par Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, 1717, i. 131] tells a long story, which Mr. Southey, in the notes on Thalaba [book viii., notes, ed. 1838, iv. 297-300], quotes about these "Vroucolochas" ["Vroucolocasses"], as he calls them. The Romaic term is "Vardoulacha." I recollect a whole family being terrified by the scream of a child, which they imagined must proceed from such a visitation. The Greeks never mention the word without horror. I find that "Broucolokas" is an old legitimate Hellenic appellation—at least is so applied to Arsenius, who, according to the Greeks, was after his death animated by the Devil. The moderns, however, use the word I mention.

Βουρκόλακας or Βρυκόλακας (= the Bohemian and Slovak Vrholak) is modern Greek for a ghost or vampire. George Bentotes, in his Λεξικον Τρίγλωσσον, published in Vienna in 1790 (see Childe Harold, Canto II. Notes, Papers, etc., No. III., Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 197), renders Βρουκόλακας "lutin," and Βρουκολιασμένος, "devenu un spectre."

Arsenius, Archbishop of Monembasia (circ. 1530), was famous for his scholarship. He prefaced his Scholia in Septem Euripidis Tragædias (Basileæ, 1544) by a dedicatory epistle in Greek to his friend Pope Paul III. "He submitted to the Church of Rome, which made him so odious to the Greek schismatics that the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated him; and the Greeks reported that Arsenius, after his death, was Broukolakas, that is, that the Devil hovered about his corps and re-animated him" (Bayle, Dictionary, 1724, i. 508, art. "Arsenius"). Martinus Crusius, in his Turco-Græcia, lib. ii. (Basileæ, 1584, p. 151) records the death of Arsenius while under sentence of excommunication, and adds that "his miserable corpse turned black, and swelled to the size of a drum, so that all who beheld it were horror-stricken, and trembled exceedingly." Hence, no doubt, the legend which Bayle takes verbatim from Guillet, "Les Grecs disent qu' Arsenius, apres la mort fust Broukolakas," etc. (Lacédémone, Ancienne et Nouvelle, par Le Sieur de la Guilletiére, 1676, ii. 586. See, too, for "Arsenius," Fabricii Script. Gr. Var., 1808, xi. 581, and Gesneri Bibliotheca Univ., ed. 1545, fol. 96.) Byron, no doubt, got his information from Bayle. By "old legitimate Hellenic" he must mean literary as opposed to klephtic Greek.]

[110] {123} The freshness of the face [? "The paleness of the face," MS.] and the wetness of the lip with blood, are the never-failing signs of a Vampire. The stories told in Hungary and Greece of these foul feeders are singular, and some of them most incredibly attested.

[Vampires were the reanimated corpses of persons newly buried, which were supposed to suck the blood and suck out the life of their selected victims. The marks by which a vampire corpse was recognized were the apparent non-putrefaction of the body and effusion of blood from the lips. A suspected vampire was exhumed, and if the marks were perceived or imagined to be present, a stake was driven through the heart, and the body was burned. This, if Southey's authorities (J. B. Boyer, Marquis d'Argens, in Lettres Juives) may be believed, "laid" the vampire, and the community might sleep in peace. (See, too, Dissertations sur les Apparitions, par Augustine Calmet, 1746, p. 395, sq., and Russian Folk-Tales, by W. R. S. Ralston, 1873, pp. 318-324.)]

[111] [For "Caloyer," see Childe Harold, Canto II. stanza xlix. line 6, and note 21, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 130, 181. It is a hard matter to piece together the "fragments" which make up the rest of the poem. Apparently the question, "How name ye?" is put by the fisherman, the narrator of the first part of the Fragment, and answered by a monk of the fraternity, with whom the Giaour has been pleased to "abide" during the past six years, under conditions and after a fashion of which the monk disapproves. Hereupon the fisherman disappears, and a kind of dialogue between the author and the protesting monk ensues. The poem concludes with the Giaour's confession, which is addressed to the monk, or perhaps to the interested and more tolerant Prior of the community.]

[du] {124} As Time were wasted on his brow.—[MS.]

[dv] {125} Of foreign maiden lost at sea.—[MS.]

[dw] {127}

Behold—as turns he from the—wall
His cowl fly back, his dark hair fall.—[ms]

[A variant of the copy sent for insertion in the Seventh Edition differs alike from the MS. and the text—]

Behold as turns him from the wall—
His Cowl flies back—his tresses fall—
That pallid aspect wreathing round.

[dx] Lo! mark him as the harmony.—[MS.]

[dy] Thank heaven—he stands without the shrine.—[MS. erased.]

[dz] {128}

Must burn before it smite or shine.—[MS.]
Appears unfit to smite or shine.—[MS. erased]

[112] [In defence of lines 922-927, which had been attacked by a critic in the British Review, October, 1813, vol. v. p. 139, who compared them with some lines in Crabbe's Resentment (lines 11—16, Tales, 1812, p. 309), Byron wrote to Murray, October 12, 1813, "I have ... read the British Review. I really think the writer in most points very right. The only mortifying thing is the accusation of imitation. Crabbe's passage I never saw; and Scott I no further meant to follow than in his lyric measure, which is Gray's, Milton's, and any one's who like it." The lines, which Moore quotes (Life, p. 191), have only a formal and accidental resemblance to the passage in question.]

[113] {129} [Compare—

"To surfeit on the same [our pleasures]
And yawn our joys. Or thank a misery
For change, though sad?"

Night Thoughts, iii., by Edward Young; Anderson's British Poets, x. 72. Compare, too, Childe Harold, Canto I. stanza vi, line 8—"With pleasure drugged, he almost longed for woe."]

[114] [Byron was wont to let his imagination dwell on these details of the charnel-house. In a letter to Dallas, August 12, 1811, he writes, "I am already too familiar with the dead. It is strange that I look on the skulls which stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, but I cannot strip the features of those I have known of their fleshy covering, even in idea, without a hideous sensation; but the worms are less ceremonious." See, too, his "Lines inscribed upon a Cup formed from a Skull," Poetical Works, 1898, i. 276.]

[115] {130} The pelican is, I believe, the bird so libelled, by the imputation of feeding her chickens with her blood. [It has been suggested that the curious bloody secretion ejected from the mouth of the flamingo may have given rise to the belief, through that bird having been mistaken for the "pelican of the wilderness."—Encycl. Brit., art. "Pelican" (by Professor A. Newton), xviii. 474.]

[ea] Than feeling we must feel no more.—[MS.]

[116] {131} [Compare—

"I'd rather be a toad,
And live upon the vapours of a dungeon."

Othello, act iii. sc. 3, lines 274, 275.]

[eb] Though hope hath long withdrawn her beam.—[MS.] [This line was omitted in the Third and following Editions.]

[ec] {132}

Through ranks of steel and tracks of fire,
And all she threatens in her ire;
And these are but the words of one
Who thus would do—who thus hath done.—[MS. erased.]

[ed] {134} My hope a tomb, our foe a grave.—[MS.]

[117] This superstition of a second-hearing (for I never met with downright second-sight in the East) fell once under my own observation. On my third journey to Cape Colonna, early in 1811, as we passed through the defile that leads from the hamlet between Keratia and Colonna, I observed Dervish Tahiri riding rather out of the path and leaning his head upon his hand, as if in pain. I rode up and inquired. "We are in peril," he answered. "What peril? We are not now in Albania, nor in the passes to Ephesus, Messalunghi, or Lepanto; there are plenty of us, well armed, and the Choriates have not courage to be thieves."—"True, Affendi, but nevertheless the shot is ringing in my ears."—"The shot. Not a tophaike has been fired this morning."—"I hear it notwithstanding—Bom—Bom—as plainly as I hear your voice."—"Psha!"—"As you please, Affendi; if it is written, so will it be."—I left this quick-eared predestinarian, and rode up to Basili, his Christian compatriot, whose ears, though not at all prophetic, by no means relished the intelligence. We all arrived at Colonna, remained some hours, and returned leisurely, saying a variety of brilliant things, in more languages than spoiled the building of Babel, upon the mistaken seer. Romaic, Arnaout, Turkish, Italian, and English were all exercised, in various conceits, upon the unfortunate Mussulman. While we were contemplating the beautiful prospect, Dervish was occupied about the columns. I thought he was deranged into an antiquarian, and asked him if he had become a "Palaocastro" man? "No," said he; "but these pillars will be useful in making a stand;" and added other remarks, which at least evinced his own belief in his troublesome faculty of forehearing. On our return to Athens we heard from Leoné (a prisoner set ashore some days after) of the intended attack of the Mainotes, mentioned, with the cause of its not taking place, in the notes to Childe Harold, Canto 2nd [Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 169]. I was at some pains to question the man, and he described the dresses, arms, and marks of the horses of our party so accurately, that, with other circumstances, we could not doubt of his having been in "villanous company" [I Henry IV., act iii. sc. 3, line 11] and ourselves in a bad neighbourhood. Dervish became a soothsayer for life, and I dare say is now hearing more musketry than ever will be fired, to the great refreshment of the Arnaouts of Berat, and his native mountains.—I shall mention one trait more of this singular race. In March, 1811, a remarkably stout and active Arnaout came (I believe the fiftieth on the same errand) to offer himself as an attendant, which was declined. "Well, Affendi," quoth he, "may you live!—you would have found me useful. I shall leave the town for the hills to-morrow; in the winter I return, perhaps you will then receive me."—Dervish, who was present, remarked as a thing of course, and of no consequence, "in the mean time he will join the Klephtes" (robbers), which was true to the letter. If not cut off, they come down in the winter, and pass it unmolested in some town, where they are often as well known as their exploits.

[118] {135} [Vide ante, p. 90, line 89, note 2, "In death from a stab the countenance preserves its traits of feeling or ferocity."]

[ee]

Her power to soothe—her skill to save—
And doubly darken o'er the grave,—[MS.]

[ef] {136}

Of Ladye-love—and dart—and chain—
And fire that raged in every vein.—[MS.]

[eg]

Even now alone, yet undismayed,—
I know no friend, and ask no aid.—[MS.]

[119] [Lines 1127-1130 were inserted in the Seventh Edition. They recall the first line of Plato's epitaph, Ἀστὴρ πριν μὲν ἔλαμπες ἐνι ζωοῖσιν ἑῷος, which Byron prefixed to his "Epitaph on a Beloved Friend" (Poetical Works, 1898, i. 18), and which, long afterwards, Shelley chose as the motto to his Adonais.]

[eh] {137}

Yes If } Love indeed { doth spring descend be born } from heaven:
A spark of that { immortal eternal celestial } fire
To human hearts in mercy given,
To lift from earth our low desire,
A feeling from the Godhead caught,
To wean from self { each our } sordid thought:
Devotion sends the soul above,
But Heaven itself descends to love,
Yet marvel not, if they who love
This present joy, this future hope
Which taught them with all ill to cope,
No more with anguish bravely cope.—[MS.]

[120] [The hundred and twenty-six lines which follow, down to "Tell me no more of Fancy's gleam," first appeared in the Fifth Edition. In returning the proof to Murray, Byron writes, August 26, 1813, "The last lines Hodgson likes—it is not often he does—and when he don't, he tells me with great energy, and I fret and alter. I have thrown them in to soften the ferocity of our Infidel, and, for a dying man, have given him a good deal to say for himself."—Letters, 1898, ii. 252.]

[ei] {138}

That quenched, I wandered far in night,
or, 'Tis quenched, and I am lost in night.—[MS.]

[ej] Must plunge into a dark abyss.—[MS.]

[ek] {139}

And let the light, inconstant fool
That sneers his coxcomb ridicule.—[MS.]

[el] Less than the soft and shallow maid.—[MS. erased.]

[em] The joy—the madness of my heart.—[MS.]

[en]

To me alike all time and place—
Scarce could I gaze on Nature's face
For every hue——.—[MS.]
or, All, all was changed on Nature's face
To me alike all time and place.—[MS. erased.]

[eo] {140}

——but this grief
In truth is not for thy relief.
My state thy thought can never guess.—[MS.]

[121] The monk's sermon is omitted. It seems to have had so little effect upon the patient, that it could have no hopes from the reader. It may be sufficient to say that it was of a customary length (as may be perceived from the interruptions and uneasiness of the patient), and was delivered in the usual tone of all orthodox preachers.

[ep] Where thou, it seems, canst offer grace.—[MS. erased.]

[eq] Where rise my native city's towers.—[MS.]

[er] I had, and though but one—a friend!—[MS.]

[es] {141}

I have no heart to love him now
And 'tis but to declare my end.—[ms]

[et]

But now Remembrance murmurs o'er
Of all our early youth had been—
In pain, I now had turned aside
To bless his memory ere I died,
But Heaven would mark the vain essay,
If Guilt should for the guiltless fray—
I do not ask him not to blame—
Too gentle he to wound my name—
I do not ask him not to mourn,
For such request might sound like scorn—
And what like Friendship's manly tear
So well can grace a brother's bier?
But bear this ring he gave of old,
And tell him—what thou didst behold—
The withered frame—the ruined mind,
The wreck that Passion leaves behind—
The shrivelled and discoloured leaf
Seared by the Autumn blast of Grief.—[MS., First Copy.]

[eu] {142} Nay—kneel not, father, rise—despair.—[MS.]

[122] {143} "Symar," a shroud. [Cymar, or simar, is a long loose robe worn by women. It is, perhaps, the same word as the Spanish camarra (Arabic camârra), a sheep-skin cloak. It is equivalent to "shroud" only in the primary sense of a "covering."]

[ev] Which now I view with trembling spark.—[MS.]

[ew] {144} Then lay me with the nameless dead.—[MS.]

[123] The circumstance to which the above story relates was not very uncommon in Turkey. A few years ago the wife of Muchtar Pacha complained to his father of his son's supposed infidelity; he asked with whom, and she had the barbarity to give in a list of the twelve handsomest women in Yanina. They were seized, fastened up in sacks, and drowned in the lake the same night! One of the guards who was present informed me that not one of the victims uttered a cry, or showed a symptom of terror at so sudden a "wrench from all we know, from all we love." The fate of Phrosine, the fairest of this sacrifice, is the subject of many a Romaic and Arnaout ditty. The story in the text is one told of a young Venetian many years ago, and now nearly forgotten. I heard it by accident recited by one of the coffee-house story-tellers who abound in the Levant, and sing or recite their narratives. The additions and interpolations by the translator will be easily distinguished from the rest, by the want of Eastern imagery; and I regret that my memory has retained so few fragments of the original. For the contents of some of the notes I am indebted partly to D'Herbelot, and partly to that most Eastern, and, as Mr. Weber justly entitles it, "sublime tale," the "Caliph Vathek." I do not know from what source the author of that singular volume may have drawn his materials; some of his incidents are to be found in the Bibliothèque Orientale; but for correctness of costume, beauty of description, and power of imagination, it far surpasses all European imitations, and bears such marks of originality that those who have visited the East will find some difficulty in believing it to be more than a translation. As an Eastern tale, even Rasselas must bow before it; his "Happy Valley" will not bear a comparison with the "Hall of Eblis." [See Childe Harold, Canto II. stanza xxii. line 6, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 37, note 1.

"Mansour Effendi tells the story (vide supra, line 6) thus: Frosini was niece of the Archbishop of Joannina. Mouctar Pasha ordered her to come to his harem, and her father advised her to go; she did so. Mouctar, among other presents, gave her a ring of great value, which she wished to sell, and gave it for that purpose to a merchant, who offered it to the wife of Mouctar. That lady recognized the jewel as her own, and, discovering the intrigue, complained to Ali Pasha, who, the next night, seized her himself in his own house, and ordered her to be drowned. Mansour Effendi says he had the story from the brother and son of Frosini. This son was a child of six years old, and was in bed in his mother's chamber when Ali came to carry away his mother to death. He had a confused recollection of the horrid scene."—Travels in Albania, 1858, i. Ill, note 6.

The concluding note, like the poem, was built up sentence by sentence. Lines 1-12, "forgotten," are in the MS. Line 12, "I heard," to line 17, "original," were added in the Second Edition. The next sentence, "For the contents" to "Vathek," was inserted in the Third; and the concluding paragraph, "I do not know" to the end, in the Fourth Editions.]

[ex] {146}

Nor whether most he mourned none knew.
For her he loved—or him he slew.—[MS.]

INTRODUCTION TO THE THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS.
swash

Many poets—Wordsworth, for instance—have been conscious in their old age that an interest attaches to the circumstances of the composition of their poems, and have furnished their friends and admirers with explanatory notes. Byron recorded the motif and occasion of the Bride of Abydos while the poem was still in the press. It was written, he says, to divert his mind, "to wring his thoughts from reality to imagination—from selfish regrets to vivid recollections" (Diary, December 5, 1813, Letters, ii. 361), "to distract his dreams from ..." (Diary, November 16) "for the sake of employment" (Letter to Moore, November 30, 1813). He had been staying during part of October and November at Aston Hall, Rotherham, with his friend James Wedderburn Webster, and had fallen in love with his friend's wife, Lady Frances. From a brief note to his sister, dated November 5, we learn that he was in a scrape, but in "no immediate peril," and from the lines, "Remember him, whom Passion's power" (vide ante, p. 67), we may infer that he had sought safety in flight. The Bride of Abydos, or Zuleika, as it was first entitled, was written early in November, "in four nights" (Diary, November 16), or in a week (Letter to Gifford, November 12)—the reckoning goes for little—as a counter-irritant to the pain and distress of amour interrompu.

The confession or apology is eminently characteristic. Whilst the Giaour was still in process of evolution, still "lengthening its rattles," another Turkish poem is offered to the public, and the natural explanation, that the author is in vein, and can score another trick, is felt to be inadequate[150] and dishonouring—"To withdraw myself from myself," he confides to his Diary(November 27), "has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive for scribbling at all."

It is more than probable that in his twenty-sixth year Byron had not attained to perfect self-knowledge, but there is no reason to question his sincerity. That Byron loved to surround himself with mystery, and to dissociate himself from "the general," is true enough; but it does not follow that at all times and under all circumstances he was insincere. "Once a poseur always a poseur" is a rough-and-ready formula not invariably applicable even to a poet.

But the Bride of Abydos was a tonic as well as a styptic. Like the Giaour, it embodied a personal experience, and recalled "a country replete with the darkest and brightest, but always the most lively colours of my memory" (Diary, December 5, 1813).

In a letter to Galt (December 11, 1813, Letters, 1898, ii. 304, reprinted from Life of Byron, pp. 181, 182) Byron maintains that the first part of the Bride was drawn from "observations" of his own, "from existence." He had, it would appear, intended to make the story turn on the guilty love of a brother for a sister, a tragic incident of life in a Harem, which had come under his notice during his travels in the East, but "on second thoughts" had reflected that he lived "two centuries at least too late for the subject," and that not even the authority of the "finest works of the Greeks," or of Schiller (in the Bride of Messina), or of Alfieri (in Mirra), "in modern times," would sanction the intrusion of the μισητὸν into English literature. The early drafts and variants of the MS. do not afford any evidence of this alteration of the plot which, as Byron thought, was detrimental to the poem as a work of art, but the undoubted fact that the Bride of Abydos, as well as the Giaour, embody recollections of actual scenes and incidents which had burnt themselves into the memory of an eye-witness, accounts not only for the fervent heat at which these Turkish tales were written, but for the extraordinary glamour which they threw over contemporary readers, to whom the local colouring was new and attractive, and who were not out of conceit with "good Monsieur Melancholy."[151]

Byron was less dissatisfied with his second Turkish tale than he had been with the Giaour. He apologizes for the rapidity with which it had been composed—stans pede in uno—but he announced to Murray (November 20) that "he was doing his best to beat the Giaour," and (November 29) he appraises the Bride as "my first entire composition of any length."

Moreover, he records (November 15), with evident gratification, the approval of his friend Hodgson, "a very sincere and by no means (at times) a flattering critic of mine," and modestly accepts the praise of such masters of letters as "Mr. Canning," Hookham Frere, Heber, Lord Holland, and of the traveller Edward Daniel Clarke.

The Bride of Abydos was advertised in the Morning Chronicle, among "Books published this day," on November 29, 1813. It was reviewed by George Agar Ellis in the Quarterly Review of January, 1814 (vol. x. p. 331), and, together with the Corsair, by Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review of April, 1814 (vol. xxiii. p. 198).

NOTE TO THE MSS. OF THE BRIDE OF ABYDOS.
swash

The MSS. of the Bride of Abydos are contained in a bound volume, and in two packets of loose sheets, numbering thirty-two in all, of which eighteen represent additions, etc., to the First Canto; and fourteen additions, etc., to the Second Canto.

The bound volume consists of a rough copy and a fair copy of the first draft of the Bride; the fair copy beginning with the sixth stanza of Canto I.

1. Stanza xxviii. of Canto II.—here called "Conclusion" (fifty-eight lines). And note on "Sir Orford's Letters."

3. An emendation of six lines to stanza v. of Canto II., with reference to the comboloio, the Turkish rosary.[152]

4. Forty additional lines to stanza xx. of Canto II., beginning, "For thee in those bright isles," and being the first draft of the addition as printed in the Revises of November 13, etc.

7. Affixed to the rough Copy in stanza xxviii., fifty-eight lines, here called "Continuation." This is the rough Copy of No. 1.

3. Seven sheets, Canto I. stanzas i.-v., being the commencement of the Fair Copy in the bound volume.

4. Two sheets of the additional twelve lines to Canto I. stanza vi., "Who hath not proved,"—"Soul."

5. Four sheets of notes to Canto I. stanza vi., dated November 20, November 22, 1813.

(ζ) Fourteen lines, "There ev'n thy soul,"—"Zuleika's name," "Aye—let the loud winds,"—"bars escape," additional to stanza xx.

4. Two sheets of five variants of "Ah! wherefore did he turn to look?" being six additional lines to stanza xxv.

6. Ten lines, "Ah! happy! but,"—"depart." And eleven[153] lines, "Woe to thee, rash,"—"hast shed," being a continuous addition to stanza xxvii.

Preface to Vol. III. of the Poems	v
Introduction to Occasional Pieces (Poems 1809-1813; Poems 1814-1816)	xix
Poems 1809-1813.
The Girl of Cadiz. First published in Works of Lord Byron, 1832, viii. 56	1
Lines written in an Album, at Malta. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	4
To Florence. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	5
Stanzas composed during a Thunderstorm. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	7
Stanzas written in passing the Ambracian Gulf. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	11
The Spell is broke, the Charm is flown! First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	12
Written after swimming from Sestos to Abydos. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	13
Lines in the Travellers' Book at Orchomenus. First published, Travels in Italy, Greece, etc., by H. W. Williams, 1820, ii. 290	15
Maid of Athens, ere we part. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	15
Fragment from the "Monk of Athos." First published, Life of Lord Byron, by the Hon. Roden Noel, 1890, pp. 206, 207	18
Lines written beneath a Picture. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)[xii]	19
Translation of the famous Greek War Song, Δεῦτε πῖδες, κ.τ.λ. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	20
Translation of the Romaic Song, Μνέπω μεσ' τὸ περιβόλι, κ.τ.λ. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	22
On Parting. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	23
Farewell to Malta. First published, Poems on his Domestic Circumstances, by W. Hone (Sixth Edition, 1816)	24
Newstead Abbey. First published, Memoir of Rev. F. Hodgson, 1878, i. 187	27
Epistle to a Friend, in answer to some Lines exhorting the Author to be Cheerful, and to "banish Care." First published, Letters and Journals, 1830, i. 301	28
To Thyrza ["Without a stone," etc.]. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	30
Stanzas ["Away, away," etc.]. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	35
Stanzas ["One struggle more," etc.]. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (4to)	36
Euthanasia. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (Second Edition)	39
Stanzas ["And thou art dead," etc.]. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (Second Edition)	41
Lines to a Lady weeping. First published, Morning Chronicle, March 7, 1812	45
Stanzas ["If sometimes," etc.]. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (Second Edition)	46
On a Cornelian Heart which was broken. First published, Childe Harold, 1812 (Second Edition)	48
The Chain I gave was Fair to view. From the Turkish. First published, Corsair, 1814 (Second Edition)	49
Lines written on a Blank Leaf of The Pleasures of Memory. First published, Poems, 1816	50
Address, spoken at the Opening of Drury-Lane Theatre, Saturday, October 10, 1812. First published, Morning Chronicle, October 12, 1812	51
Parenthetical Address. By Dr. Plagiary. First published, Morning Chronicle, October 23, 1812	55
Verses found in a Summer-house at Hales-Owen. First published, Works of Lord Byron, 1832, xvii. 244	59
Remember thee! Remember thee! First published, Conversations of Lord Byron, 1824, p. 330	59
To Time. First published, Childe Harold, 1814 (Seventh Edition)	60[xiii]
Translation of a Romaic Love Song. First published, Childe Harold, 1814 (Seventh Edition)	62
Stanzas ["Thou art not false," etc.]. First published, Childe Harold, 1814 (Seventh Edition)	64
On being asked what was the "Origin of Love." First published, Childe Harold, 1814 (Seventh Edition)	65
On the Quotation, "And my true faith," etc. MS. M.	65
Stanzas ["Remember him," etc.]. First published, Childe Harold, 1814 (Seventh Edition)	69
Impromptu, in Reply to a Friend. First published, Childe Harold, 1814 (Seventh Edition)	67
Sonnet. To Genevra ["Thine eyes' blue tenderness," etc.]. First published, Corsair, 1814 (Second Edition)	70
Sonnet. To Genevra ["Thy cheek is pale with thought," etc.]. First published, Corsair, 1814 (Second Edition)	71
From the Portuguese ["Tu mi chamas"]. First published, Childe Harold, 1814 (Seventh Edition). "Another Version." First published, 1831	71
The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale.
Introduction to The Giaour	75
Bibliographical Note on The Giaour	78
Dedication	81
Advertisement	83
The Giaour	85
The Bride of Abydos. A Turkish Tale.
Introduction to The Bride of Abydos	149
Note to the MSS. of The Bride of Abydos	151
Dedication	155
The Bride of Abydos. Canto the First	157
Canto the Second	178
Note to The Bride of Abydos	211
The Corsair: A Tale.
Introduction to The Corsair	217
Bibliographical Note on The Corsair	220
Dedication	223
The Corsair. Canto the First	227
Canto the Second	249
Canto the Third	270[xiv]
Introduction to the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte	303
Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte	305
Lara: A Tale.
Introduction to Lara	319
Lara. Canto the First	323
Canto the Second	348
Hebrew Melodies.
Introduction to the Hebrew Melodies	375
Advertisement	379
She walks in Beauty	381
The Harp the Monarch Minstrel swept	382
If that High World	383
The Wild Gazelle	384
Oh! weep for those	385
On Jordan's Banks	386
Jephtha's Daughter	387
Oh! snatched away in Beauty's Bloom	388
My Soul is Dark	389
I saw thee weep	390
Thy Days are done	391
Saul	392
Song of Saul before his Last Battle	393
"All is Vanity, saith the Preacher"	394
When Coldness wraps this Suffering Clay	395
Vision of Belshazzar	397
Sun of the Sleepless!	399
Were my Bosom as False as thou deem'st it to be	399
Herod's Lament for Mariamne	400
On the Day of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus	401
By the Rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept	402
"By the Waters of Babylon"	404
The Destruction of Sennacherib	404
A Spirit passed before me	406
Poems 1814-1816.
Farewell! if ever Fondest Prayer. First published, Corsair (Second Edition, 1814)	409
When we Two parted. First published, Poems, 1816	410
[Love and Gold.] MS. M.	411
Stanzas for Music ["I speak not, I trace not," etc.]. First published, Fugitive Pieces, 1829	413[xv]
Address intended to be recited at the Caledonian Meeting. First published, Letters and Journals, 1830, i. 559	415
Elegiac Stanzas on the Death of Sir Peter Parker, Bart. First published, Morning Chronicle, October 7, 1814	417
Julian [a Fragment]. MS. M.	419
To Belshazzar. First published, 1831	421
Stanzas for Music ["There's not a joy," etc.]. First published, Poems, 1816	423
On the Death of the Duke of Dorset. MS. M	425
Stanzas for Music ["Bright be the place of thy soul"]. First published, Examiner, June 4, 1815	426
Napoleon's Farewell. First published, Examiner, July 30, 1815	427
From the French ["Must thou go, my glorious Chief?"]. First published, Poems, 1816	428
Ode from the French ["We do not curse thee, Waterloo!"]. First published, Morning Chronicle, March 15, 1816	431
Stanzas for Music ["There be none of Beauty's daughters"]. First published, Poems, 1816	435
On the Star of "the Legion of Honour." First published, Examiner, April 7, 1816	436
Stanzas for Music ["They say that Hope is happiness"]. First published, Fugitive Pieces, 1829	438
The Siege of Corinth.
Introduction to The Siege of Corinth	441
Dedication	445
Advertisement	447
Note on the MS. of The Siege of Corinth	448
The Siege of Corinth	449
Parisina.
Introduction to Parisina	499
Dedication	501
Advertisement	503
Parisina	505
Poems of the Separation.
Introduction to Poems of the Separation	531
Fare Thee Well	537
A Sketch	540
Stanzas to Augusta	544

1. Lord Byron in Albanian Dress, from a Portrait in Oils by T. Phillips, R.A., in the Possession of Mr. John Murray	Frontispiece
2. H.R.H. the Princess Charlotte of Wales, from the Miniature in the Possession of H.M. the Queen, at Windsor Castle	to face p. 44
3. Lady Wilmot Horton, from a Sketch by Sir Thomas Lawrence	380
4. Temple of Zeus Nemeus, from a Drawing by William Pars, A.R.A., in the British Museum	470
5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from a Portrait in Oils by T. Phillips, R.A., in the Possession of Mr. John Murray	472
6. The Hon. Mrs. Leigh, from a Sketch by Sir George Hayter, in the British Museum	544

Lines.	Giaour.	Edition of——
1—6.	MS. First edition of 28 pages.
7—20.	Second edition. [47 pages, 816 lines.]	Approximate date, June 24, 1813.
21—45.	Third edition. [53 pages, 950 lines.]	July 30, 1813.
46—102.	Second edition.
103—167.	Fifth edition. [66 pages, 1215 lines.]	August 25, 1813.
168—199.	MS. First edition of 28 pages.
200—250.	Third edition.
251—252.	Seventh edition. [75 pages, 1334 lines.]	November 27, 1813.
253—276.	Third edition.
277—287.	MS. First edition of 28 pages.
288—351.	Third edition. (Second issue?) [56 pages, 1004,? 1014 lines.]	August 11, 1813.
352—503.	MS. First edition of 28 pages.
504—518.	Third edition.
519—619.	MS. First edition of 28 pages.
620—654.	Second edition.
655—688.	MS. First edition of 28 pages.
689—722.	Fourth edition. [58 pages, 1048 lines.]	August 19.
723—737.	MS. First edition of 28 pages. 733-4 not in the MS., but in First edition of 28 pages.
738—745.	First edition of 41 pages.	June 5, 1813.
746—786.	First edition of 28 pages. Not in the MS
787—831.	MS. First edition of 28 pages.
832—915.	Seventh edition.
916—998.	First edition of 41 pages. 937-970 no MS.
999—1023.	Second edition.
1024—1028.	Seventh edition.
1029—1079.	First edition of 41 pages.
1080—1098.	Third edition.
1099—1125.	First edition of 41 pages.
1126—1130.	Seventh edition.
1131—1191.	Fifth edition.
1192—1217.	Seventh edition.
1218—1256.	Fifth edition.
1257—1318.	First edition of 41 pages.
1319—1334.	MS. First edition of 28 pages.

The Works OF LORD BYRON.

A NEW, REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.

Poetry. Vol. III.

EDITED BY ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE, M.A.,HON. F.R.S.L.

LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.

1900.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

PREFACE TO THE THIRD VOLUME.

CONTENTS OF VOL. III.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION TO THE OCCASIONAL PIECES (POEMS 1809-1813; POEMS 1814-1816).

POEMS 1809-1813.

THE GIRL OF CADIZ.[1]

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

LINES WRITTEN IN AN ALBUM, AT MALTA.[e][4]

1.

2.

TO FLORENCE.[f]

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

STANZAS COMPOSED DURING A THUNDERSTORM.[h][5]

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

STANZAS WRITTEN IN PASSING THE AMBRACIAN GULF.[i]

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

THE SPELL IS BROKE, THE CHARM IS FLOWN![m]

WRITTEN AFTER SWIMMING FROM SESTOSTO ABYDOS.[7]

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

LINES IN THE TRAVELLERS' BOOK AT ORCHOMENUS.[9]

MAID OF ATHENS, ERE WE PART.[n]

1.

2.

3.

4.

FRAGMENT FROM THE "MONK OF ATHOS."[14]

1.

2.

3.

LINES WRITTEN BENEATH A PICTURE.[15]

1.

2.

The Works
OF
LORD BYRON.

A NEW, REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION,
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.

EDITED BY
ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE, M.A.,
HON. F.R.S.L.

LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.

INTRODUCTION TO THE OCCASIONAL PIECES
(POEMS 1809-1813; POEMS 1814-1816).

STANZAS WRITTEN IN PASSING THE
AMBRACIAN GULF.[i]

WRITTEN AFTER SWIMMING FROM SESTOS
TO ABYDOS.[7]

LINES WRITTEN ON A BLANK LEAF OF
THE PLEASURES OF MEMORY.[bm]